There is a moment in grief where everything feels too big.
The emotions arrive all at once — fear, sadness, love, regret, relief, anger, tenderness, longing. It can feel like overwhelm, like drowning, like the ground has disappeared beneath your feet. Many people describe this place as something to get through, get over, or get past.
But what if grief isn’t something to escape?
What if grief is something to make room for?
I’ve learned, through years of walking beside people in loss and transition, that grief doesn’t flatten us when it’s given permission. It flattens us when it has nowhere to go — when it’s rushed, minimized, silenced, or judged.
When grief is allowed to be present — in all its forms — it does something else entirely.
It deepens us.
Giving grief permission means allowing it to take its many shapes. Some days it is tears. Some days it is numbness. Some days it is laughter in the middle of sorrow. Sometimes it shows up as bargaining, or wishing, or replaying moments, or imagining different endings. All of it belongs.
There is no correct way to grieve — only an honest one.
People often say that grief is love with nowhere to go. I don’t fully believe that. To me, grief is love moving in all directions at the same time. It’s love reaching backward toward what was, forward toward what will never be, inward toward our own breaking hearts, and outward toward the people who remain.
That kind of love needs space.
When we let grief live — when we stop trying to tidy it up or make it polite — it begins to metabolize. It moves through the body instead of getting stuck inside it. It teaches us how to sit with intensity without being consumed by it. It grows our capacity to hold complexity, contradiction, and tenderness at the same time.
This is where grief becomes transformative.
Not because it’s beautiful — it often isn’t — but because it is honest.
Holding space for grief, whether our own or someone else’s, doesn’t require fixing or soothing or explaining. It requires presence, steadiness, and allowing the full truth of the moment to exist without trying to make it smaller.
I’ve learned that when grief is witnessed — truly witnessed — it doesn’t destroy us. It changes the shape of us. It carves depth. It expands compassion. It creates room inside us that wasn’t there before.
Grief doesn’t flatten me. It deepens me.
And in that depth, I’ve learned how to hold others — not by taking their pain away, but by standing beside them while it moves. If you’re carrying a story shaped by loss — recent or long ago — you don’t have to hold it alone.
My Legacy Story offers gentle prompts designed to help you put words to what has mattered, what has hurt, and what still lives inside you. There is no pressure to be polished or complete — only honest.
Sometimes telling the story is the healing.
With Love,
Hilary Schweitzer
Founder of My Legacy Story