Loss changes us.

Whether it arrives suddenly or walks beside us for years before finally making its presence known, grief has a way of unravelling the familiar. A relationship, a future imagined, a sense of safety. 

In A Grief Observed, CS Lewis, (1961) put it like this, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.” 

“Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”

Loss is about what we loved, what we expected, what we hoped to keep.

And when it is gone, it leaves with an ache that words cannot always soothe. 

Loss is disruptive.

It doesn’t politely knock at the door and wait to be let in, it barges in, uninvited and turns our world upside down.

The hope is that we find ways to rebuild - not because we ‘get over it’, but the disruption becomes part of our story. We start to rebuild not despite the grief, but alongside it.

For those who have lost, my thoughts are with you.