My brother had a theory about what it takes to process grief... And his idea was that once you're able to integrate that event as a part of the story of your life, then you're able to move forward…unresolved trauma, things that keep us stuck in certain places, are situations where we're unable to integrate an event with our story or our idea of what our life is.

And I think specifically with friends that is harder because of what we talked about, like “whose story is it?”, it feels sometimes inappropriate to think about things in that way. And it also sometimes is hard to come away with a clear story, like who “was I to this person?”, “they were someone to me but was that truly who they were because other people see them different”. I think it can cause more reason to be stuck…you have more of an inability to integrate that story because the pieces don't come together as easily…

…grief is universal and highly personal. And we all go through grieving, but rarely are we doing it at the same time. And even if you and I both lose someone equally important to us, we each had individual relationships. And so it's still going to be a personal response and reaction. And that can be really difficult for other people to swallow. It can be even harder for other people to hold. And it I think it's sort of like a balance between you know, “I'm grieving. I don't need you to hold my grief. But I do need you to hold space for my grief.” There's a difference and I think a lot of people feel like it's one in the same. Like, “if you're sad, I have to be sad.”

I like to describe grief as like a ball and your brain is a box. And in the beginning, your brain is quite small, the box is quite small and the ball is quite big, and it keeps bumping around and every time it bumps a surface. Every time it bumps the inside of the box you're hurting, and you're back in that in that very first deep, deep, sorrowful pain. But as time goes on the box around the ball grows, and it hits the sides less and less often. It's never gonna stop hitting the sides of that box. You're always gonna have moments where you go back to that place and you're hurting and you're in pain. But it will happen less and less often. And you'll have time to grow around it and learn how to deal with it.