The Redemptive Arc of Life Post Loss
There are some clients I have had the privilege of supporting over many years after the devastating loss of their person. And I want to share something I’ve seen time and time again about the redemptive arc life takes after a profound loss. This is a message of hope everyone in the midst of deep grief needs to hear.
I have been working full time, supporting grieving individuals in my private practice for more than 5 years now.
And although grief is always unique to the griever in front of me, I have come to notice common threads in the ways grief shows up initially, in the ways we cope with loss & in the way healing gets weaved through the empty spaces left behind by loss.
Did you wince when I used the word healing? Many of my clients do.
That's because our culture holds the wrong expectation about what healing means in the context of deep loss. Healing doesn't mean that we find a silver lining, that we “grow” from loss, that we are rid of the longing we feel for our person or that we are returned to who we were before loss.
What I mean by healing is something much more nuanced that holds reverence for the many ways we are forever impacted and changed by the loss of those we love. What I've seen in my own life & in the life of the clients I've been lucky enough to support over many years is that there is a redemptive arc to life after loss. I share this because it is hopeful to know. Especially if this email finds you in the early months or first few years of grief.
While loss often leaves us broken open, overwhelmed, disoriented, at times, in touch with despair and meaninglessness, this is a temporary place. This is not the final destination of grief. We travel to the dark. But most people don't make a forever home for themselves there. The redemptive arc that life takes after a profound loss doesn't mean we become “better” or “healed” but for many, it means that life can become wider, truer & deeper because we've known grief.
Redemption, in this framing, is the slow unseen work of becoming someone who can live with what was lost and still make meaning. Someone who can still love deeply, still create and still be touched by joy despite the scars. What I've seen in my work is that we learn to weave both the grief & the love that remains into the fabric of our changed life and somehow, because of it, we become more human, not less.
Healing then, is not that we deny the pain of our loss but that we become able to fold it into our understanding of what it means to be alive. We become people who's inner architecture can hold both the beauty of this life and the profound sorrow that inherently comes from loving deeply and living fully.
Grief work isn't about making something “good” out of the terrible losses we endure. It's about becoming more whole, more tender, more capable of living with truth. It's hopeful to know that this is the arc that grief tends to have when we are able to grieve well.
I'd love to know how this lands for you, feel free to email me back with your thoughts & experiences.
With love,
Marie
P.S.
If you are just beginning to tend to your grief now or if your loss is still in the early months & years, my colleague Amelia Bradaric (Grief and Trauma Therapist) and I have a new self paced online course that will help you create the foundations of healing.
A Gentle Guide to Early Grief is a simple yet profound online course that gives you the first steps to finding stability in the disorientation of early loss.
Think of it as a “how to” guide for the first 2 years of grief.
Early grief is a tender time where the focus should be on thoughtful self care, support and setting realistic expectations of yourself in grief.
This is the foundations on which you will go on to process the loss and rebuild meaningfully around it.