What Grief Can Hold

In the last two months, three people I knew passed away. They were not strangers. They were people I had a real connection with, and their deaths reminded me how much weight an ordinary exchange can carry later. A call, a conversation, or a visit can become more meaningful once you realize there will not be another one.

Their passing also stirred something deeper. I knew I was grieving them, but I was also carrying losses that had nothing to do with death.

Relocating had changed my sense of community. I missed familiar faces, people who knew me without explanation, and the ease of being surrounded by people who simply showed up. I had never really named that as grief.

Then I spoke with Kymberly Vaughn Daniels, a grief and trauma informed facilitator, and she gave me language for what I had been feeling. She explained that grief can be connected to any meaningful loss, including a person, a place, a relationship, or a version of life that no longer exists.

That helped me understand why one loss can feel larger than the moment in front of you. Grief can reopen things we thought we had already moved past.

Kymberly understands that personally. Her son, Mykai Daniels, was murdered in June 2023, and that experience shaped the work she now does with others. One thing she said stayed with me: “It is not enough to perform well. We must also be well.”

I understood exactly what she meant.

Many of us know how to keep going. We meet deadlines, answer calls, and handle what needs to be handled. But functioning is not the same as being well.

Kymberly also reminded me that grief needs somewhere safe to go. Sometimes that is family. Sometimes it is a support group. Sometimes it is one person who does not expect you to hurry through what you are feeling.

That may be what I am thinking about most now. Not whether grief disappears, but whether we give ourselves permission to acknowledge what was actually lost.

I had been grieving more than people.

I just had not called it that.

Now I can.

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