What Happens When Grief Isn't as Heavy as It Once Was
Exploring what it means to live fully after profound loss.
If you're reading this, I'm going to assume you're looking for a way through. Maybe for hope that it gets better. Or simply perspective on what others have to say bout how to live fully after profound loss.
So let me start by stating, unequivocally, that nothing I say is about getting “rid” of grief, “moving on,” or pathologizing grief. If you’ve been around for sometime, then you know we don’t do that here.
If you’re new here, welcome.
You’ll soon see that my work is based on the premise that grief is a normal, human response to loss and life-altering change. It manifests physically, mentally, emotionally, and I’d argue even spiritually. It’s not limited to the loss of life, as grief shows up wherever there is major change, in anticipatory grief, and in living losses. There is no part of our lives that grief doesn’t touch (it’s life’s glitter that you find in a nook and cranny decades later). Its ripple effect is felt years and decades (lifetimes?) after a major shift or loss.
We don’t “move on” from grief. We move forward with, we integrate, and we learn to expand our capacity to carry multiple truths at once.
Are we on the same page so far? Ok, good.
There comes a point when the weight of grief, sorrow, and loss starts to lighten. And I’m using the term “lighten” incredibly loosely here, so if the word feels off to you, think of a word you would substitute it with, and lean in.
What many grieving humans learn at some point is that joy and expansiveness can feel like betrayal after loss.
Maybe you catch yourself belly laughing for the first time. And then you feel the shock and guilt that immediately follow.
That certainly was the case for me. I laughed at some silly reel on social media and the sound of my own laughter echoed so loudly in the empty room that it frightened me.
How dare I feel joy about… anything?
“I’m so sorry, brother,” I said out loud as I held the frame with a photo of his beautiful face.
In that moment, I felt conflicted and confronted. What role does joy play in my life anymore? Do I have the right to be happy? I don’t want to be happy, because my brother is dead and our lives are forever broken! There’s nothing happy or okay about this. I’m not okay.
Those were thoughts that rushed in. It was yet another sign that life kept… on … going. Without him. And I’m some version of me that he doesn’t know and will never know. I’m a siblingless sister doing life with this new identity I never wanted. And I felt… momentarily happy?
Ugh. Grief is wild.
There’s a book I often refer to — Always a Sibling: The Forgotten Mourner’s Guide to Grief — by fellow sibling loss survivor, Annie Sklaver Orenstein (which, BTW is a must for anyone who has lost a sibling).
One of the chapters that stood out to me is titled “The Terror of Joy.” Here are a few standout lines from Annie’s book that validate this feeling:
“I resisted joy because it terrified me. It was a reminder of how fleeting everything is.”
“If I didn’t feel joy, I couldn’t feel pain.”
“…joy is the most vulnerable emotion—more than shame or fear.”
“In this new world, joy reminds us of what is no longer possible.”
You get the point.
Seeing this feeling reflected back to me as I read her book felt like permission to crack the door open to lightness. Just a little at first. Just enough to let the light in so I could get acclimated.
That was a few years ago.
I have since learned that joy is not only necessary, it is our birthright.
I’m stating that with my whole chest.
Joy, and living fully, however you define it, is our birthright. While grief rearranges our lives and how we show up in the world, as it does, there will come a point when life shifts away from the heaviness.
Maybe you make plans without immediately thinking about your person. Maybe you feel something that resembles joy and you don’t know what to do with it.
This is a nuanced conversation we don’t have nearly enough in the grief space, as so much of what’s out there is built for surviving. Understandably so, and more of that, please! It’s necessary.
And there’s a time after deep grief and sorrow that doesn’t get the airtime it deserves.
So a few weeks ago, in one of our casual griefy girls private chats where we leave podcast-worthy voice notes, a group of us brought up the subject.
Something to the effect of, what is life beyond grief?
Those voice notes sparked so much collective effervescence, that we decided to make it a live virtual roundtable, not knowing how it would be received. Over 350 registrants later, it turns out that it was received very well!
So four colleagues I adore and respect in the grief and resilience space, Blair Kaplan Venables, Kera Sanchez of Get Griefy Magazine, Tara Accardo, Imogen Carn, and I hosted a virtual roundtable in partnership with our friends at Reimagine (shout out to our MVP, Andy). We talked about meaning making, post-traumatic growth, the irony of joy after loss, and what it really looks like to become an active participant in your life again.
I’m sharing the replay-turned-podcast-episode at the end. But first, here are some nuggets I want to share with you.
The Shift is Surprisingly Subtle
You don’t wake up one morning and feel like grief has lifted. It’s more like you realize that the pop-up window, which is exactly how Kera described the intrusive thoughts about her mom’s death, has slowly closed. No longer hijacking every room you walk into.
For Blair, the shift arrived on a highway. She was driving past the town where her favorite music festival is held, years after loss had made her feel like she’d never want to have fun again, when suddenly, she found herself buying a ticket, staying for two nights, and feeling like the memory of herself again for the first time in years after the loss of both parents, a miscarriage, and other personal losses.
For me, it was the moment I described earlier of me guffawing at a silly reel. (I’ve wanted to use that word for a while now. Let me live.)
And although we can identify those moments when it all sort of “clicked,” looking back, we realize they were an accumulation of a series of events that were so subtle we missed them… like the way calluses form. Hear me out.
The (grief) callus
Early grief is often compared to an open wound.
Years later, it feels more like a callus. (A scar analogy is probably better here, but we’re going with callus for this.)
When I was completing my grief care professional certification, I remember my instructor, Megan Devine, mentioning that to hold space for others, we must learn to develop emotional distance so we’re not swallowed whole by another’s pain. I’m paraphrasing here.
We’re not talking about becoming a calloused, emotionally flat person. I’m referring to the type of callouses guitarists develop as part of their art, which enables them to play without constant pain in their fingers.
Or the callous a ballerina develops as they perfect the perfect point.
There’s an implication in conversations like the one we had that there’s some emotional distance from the loss. That we’ve developed that protective “callous,” which forms as we become more adept at something.
I may be stretching this analogy here a bit, but the point being that as we learn to move forward with grief, we get better at carrying it. At living with it. At integrating it into our everyday existence.
Time + processing + community + integrating + leaning into life’s questions tends to grow something around the wound that makes it possible to carry.
Had the first-year-grief version of me heard this conversation, she would have told me to get out of her face. She was in the thick of it where it’s hazy, suffocating, bleak.
A conversation about joy and living fully after loss would have sent that version of me over the edge.
Wisdom is knowing there’s a timing for everything, and honoring that.
The version of me who spoke during last week’s roundtable has spent nearly seven years processing, integrating, living and loving into the questions and the answers like Rilke suggests, holding space for and talking to hundreds of grievers, and slowly learning what it means to move forward with. Those are two very different versions of me. And both honored what they needed at that time.
So if you’re in the early fog right now and this conversation feels like too much, that’s perfectly valid. You don’t need to rush toward growth or meaning or expansion. You just need to feel what you’re feeling. The season of expansion will arrive on your timeline, not anyone else’s.
Micro Joys and “Life’s little pleasures”
My brother Yosef used to talk about LLPs (“life’s little pleasures”), and we have the hat to prove it.
Yosef lived out his LLPs. A sunny day meant time spent outdoors. A turtle crossing the road, as they often do in Southeast Florida, would result in a rescue mission to save its life. It looked like us enjoying our dad’s home-cooked meals (he’s a self proclaimed “food alchemist,” and I do not disagree).
LLPs was Yosef’s way of inviting presence and mindfulness.
I understand it now. Back then, I saw LLPs as one of Yosef's many lovable quirks. Today, they have become my blueprint for navigating life and inviting presence.
During early grief, those little pleasures feel impossible. Or worse, they feel like betrayal.
What I know now is that grief and joy are sisters. And the micro joys, glimmers, and LLPs are how we survive and move through macro grief.
The actions forward tend to be so small we miss them entirely.
Tara talked about the little sparks of joy and the importance of getting curious about them rather than dismissing them. Blair described them as glimmers. Kera described it as “dopamine grieving,” a term she coined to describe how she moves through grief by choosing the little things that spark joy. Just like dopamine dressing, the idea that you intentionally curate outfits and accessories that brighten your mood, but applied to grief.
Or like felicitreza™️, a word I coined, combining the Spanish words felicidad (happiness) and tristeza (sadness), to capture the essence of life after loss where we learn to hold both. Joy-grief. Happy-sadness.
(New podcast coming soon!)
Becoming an active participant in your life
I recall a conversation in my early grief where someone said, “you have to become an active participant in your life again.”
Those words both hurt and healed, although not at the same time.
They stayed with me for years as the phrase reverberated through each new life experience lived after Yosef. (That still sounds so weird.)
Post-traumatic growth in real, non-polished terms doesn’t look like an intentional pivot. For Imogen, it looked like losing friendships, going through a dark night of the soul, coming out the other side, and not recognizing her life. Disorienting and lonely before it was anything else. For Tara, it looked like being an only child left with probate paperwork and her parents’ belongings after losing both of them within eighteen months, then hearing her grandmother call her an orphan, and not being able to laugh at that until years later.
For me, it looked like talking about grief out loud in a culture that wants to mute it, and deciding to make that my life’s work. Something I continue to practice. It looked like shedding identities that no longer served me, incorporating Yosef’s memory into everything I do, and noticing how my relationship to grief and joy continues to evolve.
It’s how we choose to reengage with life understanding we have agency and the ability to make meaning, if we so choose to.
Grief is physical AF
One of the other things that came up was the body. Imogen talked about separating grief from trauma, which she learned from a researcher on her podcast, and about discovering breathwork as the thing that finally let her nervous system come back down from high alert. She described it as finally feeling like she could do this.
Grief shows up in the body. Understanding that, and finding ways to work with your nervous system and not just your mind, was one of the biggest shifts several of us named.
How we became active participants in our lives again looks very different, as it does for every human who has done so. But I’m naming this, because comparison is the thief of joy, and we live in a highlight-reel, social media-forward culture that prompts feelings of inadequacy or failure without showing the messy middle behind each aesthetic post.
How you choose to embrace life again is completely up to you. And it is enough.
Death ends a life, but not a relationship
How do you stay connected to the person you lost while still growing?
This is always one of my favorite topics, because continued bonds theory is what shifted how I grieve into something I could handle. It gave me permission to keep showing up as Yosef’s sister. To incorporate his memory and his legacy into everything I do, everything I build, everything I share.
Blair has her mom’s signature tattooed on her writing arm. Tara visits a medium when she feels called to. Kara describes her mom as co-creating the magazine with her, sending signs through the number six, pushing her forward.
We have agency in how we choose to continue our bonds. We don’t stop being their sibling or their child or their person.
The “how” is, of course, unique to each of us. However, like the speakers, many attendees shared they practice continued bonds through signs. One person asked what signs are, to which I shared:
A sign is “a point of connection or synchronicity that has their energetic footprint. So something that you associate with them. It's almost like a language that only you would have understood with that person. And something shows up in a way that makes you pause."
Essentially, it’s a sort of language we develop with the unseen. Another loosely used term that you can replace with whatever sits best with you (spirit, energy, angels…).
I've found that signs are easier to notice when I slow down enough to pay attention. When I quiet the mental noise, slow down, and become present, I create space for connection.
If it feels like a point of connection, if it fosters joy and peace, that’s good enough.
Signs can look like synchronicities, “magical” moments like a bird that you associate with your person flying up to your window at a moment you were feeling deep sorrow. Or messages through dreams, an encounter with a stranger who shares their name, and so on.
What signs have you experienced?
“One wild and precious life”
Near the end of the roundtable, I quoted “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver, because… its Mary freaking Oliver.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"
This question has been a lighthouse as I’ve kept moving forward after Yosef’s death.
It helped me and continues to help me recognize the next immediate step forward, and recenter on the days that feel spiraly and whirlwindy.
The answer changes often. It has evolved as I’ve evolved, it orients me, and it continues to free my heart, mind, and spirit, to be an active participant in my life. Imperfectly, yet honestly.
Grief changes us. But it doesn’t end our capacity to be surprised by life (in good ways).
Listen to the full roundtable
This episode includes the complete recording and everything I did not capture in a single post.
We talked about living losses like divorce, job loss, and the grief of a marriage that ends. We talked about what it means to build something around grief and then realize you are more than your grief. And about what it looks like to hold all of it, the podcast, the magazine, the marketing business, the kids, the travel, the motherhood, at once.
Also available on:
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Apple Podcasts
Loss rearranges us, and grief changes us. But it doesn’t end our capacity to be surprised by life.
If anything, it attunes us to the art of noticing what’s here. The LLPs, conversations like these, signs, and the ways we live into the questions.
Perhaps that’s what living fully after loss is about. Allowing ourselves be cracked open. Letting the metamorphosis to take hold. Expanding our capacity to hold the vastness of our human experience.
Imperfectly, yet honestly.
Nina Rodriguez is a Grief-informed Guide, podcaster, writer, and speaker helping humans thrive in the “and” of life. Following the unexpected loss of her only sibling, Yosef, she founded GRIEF AND LIGHT™, an award-winning podcast and supportive online community to educate and empower individuals navigating loss and life-altering change. Through her work and collaborative spaces, Nina aims to foster a more grief-fluent, hopeful world. Learn more at: griefandlight.com.
This really resonates, Nina. I came up with a similar term after my brother died-- "magedy." Tragedy + magic. For me, there was something about really allowing myself to feel all the deep, raw, griefy feelings that also opened up a space for light to sneak in. Love this topic.
Nina, you travel the whole grief highway here. Love it. So many powerful notions I embrace -- from Mary Oliver to micro-moments of joy. So much truth, I would add that I think there is another layer in the loss of a child -- particularly complicated loss. Because the grief is so primal and rooted in our DNA, the joy becomes inextricably intertwined with the pain--even in the micro-moments. Not an either or. I coined the word "metamournphosis" to describe this.We carry that ache and joy together forever. I new way of being.