Grief Is Not a Problem to Solve

Grief is love with nowhere to go. It is not a stage to pass through on the way back to productivity.

We live in a culture that treats grief as a disruption — something to be processed quickly and set aside so you can return to being useful. There are deadlines for it. Stages. A general expectation that by a certain point you should be back to functioning at full capacity.

This applies especially to women, who are expected to carry others' grief and manage others' emotional lives while also being expected not to burden anyone with their own. The woman who is still grieving is told she is stuck. The woman who cries at work is told she is unprofessional. The woman who takes time — real time — to honor a loss is told she is self-indulgent.

We would rather say this: grief is appropriate. Grief is proportionate to love. The size of the grief is the size of what mattered. There is nothing wrong with you. You are not behind schedule. The body knows what it lost, and it takes the time it takes.

You are allowed to be here, exactly as you are, for as long as you need.