Grief in All Its Forms: Reflections at Year’s End

Coming to the end of 2025 and finding myself “between the years,” as the Germans so poetically call the days between Christmas and New Year, I’ve been feeling a lot. It’s been quite a year emotionally — for many of us, and for me personally. Two big life events have shaped these past months: the death of my mother and marrying my partner of seven years. I’ve been cast into the landscape of grief, a terrain that feels both unfamiliar and strangely intimate.

I’ve been fortunate not to have lost many of those closest to me — perhaps unusually so — and my mother’s death has placed me on new and unsteady ground. In this space, I found myself reaching for Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (North Atlantic Books, 2015), a book that has been a steady companion as I navigate this shifting inner world.

Grief Is Not Only About Death

One of the most grounding insights in Weller’s work is his reminder that grief is not limited to the death of loved ones. It encompasses all forms of loss — the endings, ruptures, disappointments, and transitions that shape a human life.

We grieve:

• relationships that changed or ended

• versions of ourselves we’ve outgrown

• dreams that didn’t unfold the way we hoped

• places we’ve left behind

• communities we no longer belong to

• the childhood we needed but didn’t receive

• the world we wish existed but doesn’t

  
  

Grief is woven into the fabric of being alive. It is the quiet ache of impermanence, the recognition that everything we love is touched by change. For me, this broader understanding has been both comforting and clarifying. It helps explain why the death of my mother has stirred so many other layers — old memories, forgotten longings, shifts in identity, questions about belonging and home. With her death, I have lost the possibility of asking her more about who she was, what her experience in this world was really like for her. With this comes painful feelings of regret, guilt, and sorrow. And yet, alongside the pain, something unexpected has emerged. Since she died, it feels as though a blanket of amnesia has lifted. Some of my childhood memories have become more vivid and clearer. I’m able to see more of the goodness that was there all along, yet only vaguely accessible until now.

Marriage, too, has brought its own form of grief — the kind that accompanies transition. It is both the beginning of a new chapter and the ending of an old one. Making a commitment to someone for the rest of life means letting go of other possibilities. Choosing to spend your life with someone means choosing that person, “warts and all.” This, in itself, requires a kind of mourning: accepting reality, accepting your partner for who they are, and acknowledging the ways they are different from you. If we don’t do this inner work, we can end up wishing our partner were different, needing them to change in order for us to be happy. Accepting that we cannot change our partner involves seeing the good and also mourning the things we will never have — and making peace with that.

It feels to me as though the container of feelings within me has expanded from the inside out. It’s uncomfortable, like a kind of growing up that I never consciously chose. A widening of the emotional cauldron — one that can hold both painful and tender feelings at the same time.

The Sacred Work of Feeling What Hurts

Weller writes about grief as a sacred task — not something to “get over,” but something to tend. He speaks of sorrow as a teacher, one that deepens our capacity for presence, compassion, and connection. This resonates deeply with my own experience these past months. Grief has slowed me down, softened me, and asked me to listen more closely to the parts of myself that I often move past too quickly.

He also reminds us that grief needs witnessing. It is not meant to be carried alone. In many cultures, mourning is communal — held in ritual, song, and shared presence. Our modern world often lacks these containers, leaving people to navigate profound loss in isolation. Reading his reflections affirmed something I feel strongly in my work: that healing often begins the moment someone feels seen in their sorrow.

Walking With Grief

As I move through this first year without my mother, I’m learning that grief is not a single event but a landscape — one that shifts, surprises, and reveals new contours over time. Weller’s writing has helped me understand grief not as a detour from life, but as part of the path. A way of honoring love. A way of staying connected to what is real.

And perhaps most importantly, a reminder that we are not meant to walk this terrain alone.

Source

Weller, Francis. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. North Atlantic Books, 2015.