Grief Carries Profound Wisdom

In our modern, Western, culture, we talk about grief as if it’s a disruption. Something that interrupts our lives and needs to be managed, treated, or overcome. But what if that’s a misreading of the whole experience?

What if grief also carries deep wisdom?

Because here’s what I’ve seen in the context of my work as a Death Doula who companions people through life-altering losses:

Grief knows things the mind doesn’t always know… yet.

It knows where we’ve been cut off from ourselves.
It knows what mattered. And what still does.
It knows what’s important and what can be let go of.
It knows when something sacred has occurred and refuses to let it be minimized or swept aside.

This is not dysfunction.
This is knowing.

Grief, when allowed its place, becomes a truth-teller.
It rearranges our priorities.
It strips away pretense.
It insists on integrity between our inner world and our outer life.

I work with grieving people every day, people who have been told they’re too emotional, too stuck, too sensitive, too much. What I see instead is that they’re responding appropriately to something incomprehensibly real and true.

They are experiencing something profoundly meaningful that the culture has forgotten how to hold.

And I say this gently, but directly:
Much of the current grief space, both clinical and coaching, is still too quick to frame grief as a pathology or a problem to fix.

And it makes people feel like they’re failing at healing.

But grief is not a problem. It’s not an emergency. It doesn’t resolve quickly or neatly. It is slow. It needs tending. It needs curiosity and presence.
It is a sign that something mattered enough to leave an imprint.

Your grief is not a pathology.
Your ache, your exhaustion, your longing... are evidence of your humanity, not your failure.

So here’s what I want to leave you with:

Your grief is not a detour.
It’s a directional force.
It’s pointing to what mattered.
To what still matters.

And yes, it can undo you.
But in the undoing, something else is revealed, something true and honest and important.

What has your grief revealed?

Let me know.

Marie