She came up to me after my presentation ended, tears already streaming down her face. I had been speaking at a nursing conference, sharing about the workshops we run for healthcare providers. Somewhere in the middle of it, I mentioned grief. I mentioned my sister. I honestly don’t remember exactly what I said: it wasn’t the point of the presentation, barely a side note. But she heard it. And she had just lost her sister.
I was not surprised she found me. That’s what grief does. It moves toward safety like water finding a crack. When you are carrying something that heavy, your whole body is scanning the room for someone who might understand, someone who won’t flinch, won’t rush you, won’t look away.
“What if grief is not the opposite of wellness, but a doorway into it?”
What I do remember, more than anything else about that moment, is how many times she apologized for her tears. Over and over again, even after I told her it was okay. Even after I said it was an honor to witness her grief. Even after I said her tears were showing me exactly how much her sister meant to her. She kept apologizing. We have been so trained to hide our grief in public that she could not stop saying sorry for the most human thing she could possibly do. And that, I think, is the real problem with how we handle loss.
We spend enormous energy trying not to grieve. Denying that the losses even happened. Some losses are impossible to ignore: a parent, a child, a loved one who leaves a hole so large you can feel the wind moving through it. But the quieter losses are the ones we most often bury: the loss of a belief we once held, the loss of an ability we once had, the loss of a hope we thought we’d have fulfilled by now. Loss happens daily. And we have built our lives around the project of never losing, and when we do lose, we spend a lot of time making sure no one can tell.
We don’t cry in public. We don’t admit we actually wanted the thing we lost. We put on the show that we are fine—that it didn’t really matter that much anyway.
But here’s what I know from living inside grief and walking alongside others in theirs: Grief doesn’t disappear because we hide it. It waits. It collects. And it quietly reshapes the way we think, decide, and move through the world. When we are grieving, our entire nervous system reorganizes itself around survival, around getting through this moment, this hour, this day. There is no bandwidth left for anything else.
And yet grief is one of the only experiences we can guarantee we will have. We will all lose. Every single one of us. And as a culture, we spend very little time acknowledging, preparing for, or honoring it.
We have poured enormous resources into wellness. Into spiritual growth, personal development, optimization. We track our sleep, hire coaches, buy courses, build morning routines. And there is nothing wrong with any of that. But I want to ask a question that I think we quietly avoid: What if grief is not the opposite of wellness, but a doorway into it?
We treat grief like a problem to be solved, a wound to be closed. But what if the unattended grief is exactly what is keeping us from the growth we are so desperately seeking?
Back to that sweet woman at the conference: After she apologized for the fifth or sixth time, I took her hands. I told her that her tears were not an interruption. They were information. They were her body saying this mattered. She mattered.
What her grief was looking for, what all grief looks for, is not a solution. It is a witness. We do not have many rituals in our culture for collective grief. We do not have many spaces where it is acceptable to fall apart in front of another person and have that be okay, even sacred. So when a grieving person finds even a small opening (a speaker who mentions a sister, a stranger who doesn’t look away), their grief rushes toward it. Not because something is wrong with them. Because something is right with them. Because they are human and they know, somewhere underneath all the apologies, that they are not meant to carry this alone. I know this because I have been her.
Every time I sit down for coffee with a close friend, I know that at some point one of us will cry. It is not a flaw in our friendship. It is the whole point of it. But I remember the first time I cried in a coffee shop, really cried, in front of another person. I was mortified. And when I sat with that embarrassment later, I realized something that surprised me: I wasn’t only embarrassed for myself. I was embarrassed for my friend. For putting her in the position of being seen in public with someone who was falling apart. As if my grief were contagious. As if being near it made her somehow less.
That’s when I started asking a different question. When we apologize for our tears, what exactly are we apologizing for? Is it the tears themselves? Is it the fear that crying means we are weak, that we have been reduced, that our grief has gotten the better of us? Or is it something deeper—are we apologizing for needing to be cared for? Because when we cry in front of another person, we are not just showing them our pain. We are asking them to hold us in it. And for those of us who have spent a lifetime being the strong one, the capable one, the one who holds everyone else together, that ask can feel like the most vulnerable thing in the world.
We are not apologizing for our tears. We are apologizing for our need. And it is in that need—in the moment we stop hiding it and let someone else in—that something unexpected happens: Joy. Not joy that arrives because the grief is gone. Not joy as a reward for having survived it. But joy that surfaces in the very act of being received. Of being held. Of discovering that your need did not push the other person away—it drew them closer. That is the joy that grief has been guarding all along. The depths at which we honor our grief are the exact depths at which we are capable of experiencing joy. They are not opposites. They are the same medicine.
That woman’s tears were not a sign that she was broken. They were a sign that she was still connected: to her sister, to her loss, to her own heart.
Your grief is not something to apologize for. It is something to bring into the room—and to look for those who can hold it alongside you.
