Grief: Losing, Transforming.

Grief is not just sadness. It’s silence. It’s emptiness. It’s that moment when the world keeps spinning, but a part of you stands still.

I’ve lived through many kinds of grief in my life. Some left marks on my body. Others settled deep in my soul. All of them changed me.

I lost my parents. I lost my brother. Not all at once, but sometimes the pain piles up as if it were. The death of the people who formed you, raised you, held you… it’s not something you can explain with words. You feel it in your body. In skin that becomes thinner. In eyes that search but find nothing. In a soul that feels lost.

When my mother died, I felt I lost my deepest root. When my father died, I lost my foundation. When my brother died, I lost my mirror. With each of them, a part of me also died. And something new was born. Because grief isn’t just about letting go it’s also about rebuilding.

For a long time, my way of surviving was to keep going. Work. Travel. Do. But the body doesn’t forget. And one day, the grief I had neatly stored away began to speak. It showed up as tightness in my fisic. As insomnia. As that lingering feeling of “something’s missing,” even when everything seemed fine.

Then came other forms of grief. Grieving material loss: the family house, the land, the sense of security. Symbolic grief: my place in the world, my identity, my role. And though they weren’t people, they still hurt. Because they weren’t just things they were memories, stories, dreams. No one sends you condolences for that. Those are the quiet griefs. And that’s when I realized that grief doesn’t always come with a coffin. Sometimes it takes the shape of a sold piece of land, an empty house, a legacy that slipped through your hands.

Now I know that grief is not something you “get over.” It’s something you inhabit. Something you learn to live with. Every loss brought me a lesson. Every void brought forth a new version of myself.

Art helped me. Drawing. Channeling. Writing. My body also spoke: through pain, through release, and eventually, through openness. I learned how to accompany my own grief… and later, how to accompany others through theirs.

So if you’re grieving don’t rush. Don’t force yourself to be okay. Grief has its own timing and its own language. And even if you can’t see it now, there is life beyond the pain. A different kind of life more honest, more awake.

And with time… I understood something even deeper: that I hadn’t truly lost anything. Because what really matters is still with me. It lives in my way of seeing the world, in my silences, in who I’ve become. There is no loss when there is integration.

I invite you to see your grief as a process of transformation. Because even if we never go back to who we were, we can become something new. Something deeper. Something more real.