I read something that said, “There’s something important that often gets misunderstood: grieving and being sad is not the same as being negative.”
And that hit me me. Right there. Thank you to whoever wrote those wise words…
We live in a culture that is very uncomfortable with grief. All of us.
A culture that often confuses sadness with pessimism and pain with weakness. Somewhere along the way, we were taught that feeling deeply means we are doing something wrong. But grief is not negativity.
Grief is love.
When someone is grieving, missing their child, their partner, their parent, their person, they are not choosing darkness. They are honouring connection. I will say that again:
They are honouring connection.
They are carrying love that did not disappear when their person did. Love does not vanish simply because someone is no longer physically here.
What often feels uncomfortable to others is not our grief itself, but the reminder of how deeply we can love. Grief makes love visible. It brings it right to the surface.
It reminds people of loss, of vulnerability, and of the truth that loving fully means risking heartbreak. And that is scary stuff. We all experience it.
It is the most natural thing in the world to grieve someone we love and lost.
What is unnatural is shutting it down.
What is unnatural is pretending they did not exist.
What is unnatural is being told to stay positive when your heart is broken.
Grief is not something to fix or rush through. It is not a problem to solve. It is the flip side of love. And love always deserves to have a place to go.
Grief does have somewhere to land. It lands when we speak their name. When we tell their stories. When we allow ourselves to feel what rises instead of pushing it away. It lands when we share our love in spaces that feel safe and held, where we do not have to explain or minimize what we carry.
We do not move on from love.
We learn how to carry it differently. Sometimes carrying it looks like tears. Sometimes it looks like quiet strength.
And sometimes it looks like simply surviving the day and trusting that is enough.
There is nothing negative about that.