Announcement

Newsletter Referral Competition

I’m beyond thrilled to announce the winner of our recent giveaway! Not only did the winner refer 9 friends to the newsletter (wow, right?), but she also decided to gift her award to someone else—passing on the love in true “buy the person behind you their coffee” fashion. **insert ugly-happy cry face**

Our runner-up wasn’t far behind, referring 5 friends, and I have to say, I’m genuinely impressed by the support and community spirit you’ve all shown.

This act of kindness is exactly the kind of energy I want to continue nurturing here. Thank you, as always, for your endless love, support, inspiration, and feedback. You’re helping make my dreams come true—whether you realize it or not!

The Shift

Death and Grief

This week, I want to talk about grief. Particularly as it relates to losing a loved one.

In future editions I’ll discuss the nuanced, overlooked, and silent types of grief like (loss of identity, death of a dream, grieving what should or could have been) but for now, lets just get some facts straight and answer some questions that people often want to know when it comes to grief.

Little-Known Facts About Grief

The five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — were developed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross for terminally ill patients facing their own death, not for the bereaved. Over time, the model was misappropriated, simplified, and absorbed into pop psychology as a tidy, linear checklist for mourners.

Grief doesn’t work like that... Grief is like a toddler with a Sharpie. It shows up uninvited, makes a mess, and just when you think it's quiet, it pulls out the paints.

Grief alters your brain chemistry and activates the same neural circuits as physical pain (dACC and anterior insula). That’s why chest tightness, stomach aches, tight throat, and fatigue during grief aren’t psychosomatic “overreactions” — they’re literal outcomes of pain signals processed through shared neural networks.

“Closure” isn’t a real psychological or neurological concept. The idea of closure is uniquely Western — focused on control and finality – as if grief has a finish line. What neuroscience and bereavement research focuses on is integration — how the brain gradually learns to reorganize emotional attachment networks in the absence of the person.

Here’s what the research tells us:

When someone dies, the brain’s attachment system (ventral striatum, amygdala, default mode network) doesn’t just “turn off.” That’s why you may still feel their presence, hear their voice, or reach for your phone to text them — even years later. These are signs of a brain trying to adapt, not malfunctioning.

Over time, the hippocampus (memory) and prefrontal cortex (emotion regulation) help transform raw grief into something the brain can carry — sadness, yes, but no longer crippling. The pain can coexist with meaning.

A perfect example of this is when you start crying at the sight of a cantaloupe in the produce aisle because you're your dead loved one liked cantaloupe — and you hate cantaloupe — but now it’s emotionally significant.

Part of Grief Worth Mentioning

We grieve futures, not just people.

It’s the kids we’ll never have, the trip we didn’t take, the apologies we’ll never hear, the cookies they’ll never bake us. These invisible losses can hit just as hard as the death itself — yet they’re often unspoken and unacknowledged. Grief here becomes about narrative collapse — not just absence.

Grief manifests in many ways

There’s no “right” way to grieve. But sometimes we expect others to grieve the way we would — or in a way that aligns with our emotional needs— and they don't; it can cause confusion, frustration, and aloneness. Like when someone stays stoic and you expected them to cry, and you think, “I don’t understand... is this not affecting them?” That disconnect can make grief even more difficult and isolating.

You don’t need to do anything with your grief

You don’t have to turn your pain into poetry or become “stronger” or “wiser.” Sometimes grief just breaks us. And that’s okay. Healing isn’t always visible or inspirational — sometimes, it’s simply about surviving without losing yourself and becoming completely numb.

Grief moves

It comes and goes, changing in intensity — sometimes a dull ache, other times a wave pulls you under unexpectedly: in the grocery store, while looking at a painting, in the middle of a laugh. And just when you think you're finding your footing, the aftershocks hit — the shifting family dynamics, the identity crises, the silence where a voice used to be, important life events unimagined without them.

Time Doesn’t Heal All Wounds

Someone once told me, “Time heals all wounds.” And I just sat there thinking — Ma’am, I’ve had a splinter for six months. Time is not doing anything.

Truth is, time alone doesn’t necessarily heal — it creates distance. And while distance can soften pain, it doesn’t resolve it. Unprocessed grief doesn’t just fade away; it waits. It finds clever ways to resurface — through irritability, fatigue, anxiety, or crying. What actually helps is how we use the time. Whether we give ourselves space to feel, to reflect, to talk, to remember. Whether we move with the grief instead of trying to outrun it. In therapy, we’d call that integration.

Is My Grief Normal?

Most grief studies are based on WEIRD samples – “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.”

This is significant because it leads us to understand grief through a narrow, often incomplete framework — absent of communal mourning traditions, ritual-based grief work, or spiritual frameworks.

In many Western societies, people are expected to “move on” quickly – the “normal” grieving period used in some studies?

6 months.

Imagine telling someone who lost a child or a partner of 40 years that they should be done by then.

But many people still wonder when is it “too long” or “too much”?

When grief is diagnosed as Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD), it refers to grief so intense and persistent that it significantly disrupts daily functioning – showering, working, socializing, paying bills, eating, sleeping.

The inclusion of PGD in diagnostic manuals sparked serious debate. Supporters argue it validates those trapped in overwhelming, long-term grief. Critics counter that it medicalizes a natural response to profound love and loss – potentially leading to unnecessary medication or insurance claims demanding recovery timelines.

Encouragingly, newer theories recognize that maintaining relationships with the deceased – through memory, ritual, and even conversation – is healthy. Talking to your dead mom? Once considered pathological, it's now increasingly recognized as adaptive.

Before telling yourself to "get over it," consider that there are many more dimensions to grief than our limited Western framework acknowledges.

Shared Experience

Many non-Western cultures view death and grief in a fundamentally different way—not as an event that must be "fixed," ignored, hidden, or hurried through, but as a natural part of the human experience.

We struggle with this. Facing our own mortality is not a pastime for us. Unless we’ve taken up the Stoic practice of "Memento Mori," we're more likely drowning out our existential fears with wine and doom scrolling.

But in many traditions, death is discussed openly and frequently. It is part of the cultural consciousness.

In the West, it often becomes an awkward dance. We tiptoe around it, afraid to say the wrong thing, worried that bringing it up might upset someone. So instead, we say nothing at all. But the truth is, many of us are already thinking about it — often, quietly, constantly — and we’re already upset, so it can’t be made worse. When no one speaks to that experience, it can feel deeply isolating.

In other cultures, there is no sharp divide between life and death, body and spirit. Death is viewed as a cyclical dance: birth, death, rebirth. Death means a return to ancestors, the earth, or the spirit world. It's all relational, interconnected, and continuous. Consequently, grief is treated as an ongoing journey of remembrance, adaptation, and connection.

Another challenging aspect of our culture, is that we mostly grieve alone. Of course, there is initial formality—a funeral or memorial, a vigil, an after-service gathering – and occasional check-in texts and "I'm sorry for your loss" cards follow – then nothing.

We lack the collective mourning experience of other cultures. No communal rituals, ceremonies, or mourning practices. No celebrating and honoring the dead on a regular basis, like Japan's Obon Festival or Mexico's Día de los Muertos.

When death isn't part of our conversations or daily practices, when no sacred days connect us to the departed, we naturally question our grieving process.

Here Is What You Can Do Differently:

• Befriending death rather than fearing it (easier said than done) or at least working on our relationship with death and grief. Accepting that death is inevitable and beyond our control can encourage you to focus on how you live rather than fearing the end.

• Create rituals and practices that foster ongoing remembrance and mourning. They remind us that mourning isn’t a one-time event, but a continuing conversation with loss.

• Opening conversations to make death and grief normal parts of our shared experience - If someone you know has lost someone, talk about it. A little awkwardness is so much better than silence. One of my favorite questions to ask — a gem Chelsea shared with me — is: What was your favorite thing about them? What did you love?

• Tell their stories. Keep saying their name. Tell the funny stories, the weird ones, the quiet ones. Pass them on. This is how we keep people alive — in our memory and in our bones.

• Share the unspoken and unacknowledged with someone else, the tiny, daily absences that compound. Talk (and ask) about the specific parts you/they miss — the smell of their shampoo, the sound of their keys in the door, the way they made you feel safe. If possible take an action to commemorate - bake your mom’s cookie recipe and share them with others, wear their scarf, play their favorite song.

• We don’t know when the aftershocks will hit but when you’re suddenly undone by a scent, a photo, a random Tuesday — take it as a sign that they are here with you and are waving hello.

The Essentials

YOUR WEEKLY TOOLKIT

Resources for your emotional & mental toolkit - including articles, strategies, techniques, frameworks, videos, people to check out, links, and anything else I find helpful.

A Movie and New Way Of Living

Alright so this movie is profound and shocking and it rocked me to my core. I would recommend watching it even though I spent two hours crying and staring at a wall after I did. Hopefully, it will change the way you live too. Here is a quote:

Tim: We're all traveling through time together, every day of our lives. All we can do is do our best to relish this remarkable ride.

And in the end I think I've learned the final lesson from my travels in time; and I've even gone one step further than my father did. The truth is I now don't travel back at all, not even for the day. I just try to live every day as if I've deliberately come back to this one day, to enjoy it, as if it was the full final day of my extraordinary, ordinary life.