There is a moment in grief that nobody warns you about.
It doesn’t come in the first days, when the shock is still holding you up like scaffolding. It doesn’t come at the funeral, or in the weeks when the casseroles arrive and the phone keeps ringing.
It comes later — in the silence, in the ordinary Tuesday afternoons when the world has moved on and you are still standing in the middle of your own devastation, wondering how any of this is possible.
That is the moment I want to talk about. Because that moment — as unbearable as it is — is also a doorway.
I know that sounds impossible when you are inside it. I know it can feel like the cruelest thing someone could say to you. But I have lived it, and I have walked alongside hundreds of women who have lived it, and I want to tell you what I have learned: grief is one of the most powerful spiritual openings available to us as human beings. Not because the loss is good. Not because we would choose it. But because it does something that almost nothing else can do — it strips away everything that was never really us.
The roles we performed. The stories we told ourselves about who we were. The armor we built to stay safe in a world that sometimes felt dangerous. Grief takes all of it. And underneath — raw and trembling and more real than anything we have ever known — is the soul.
I saw this in myself after my son Bryan was murdered in 2008. In the wreckage of that loss, something cracked open that I had spent a lifetime keeping closed. I began to ask questions I had never dared ask. I began to seek in ways I had never thought to seek. And what I found on the other side of that seeking changed everything — not because the pain disappeared, but because I discovered that I was so much larger than my pain.
Your grief is not a detour from your life. It is not a punishment. It is not evidence that something went wrong. It is an initiation — and you are further along than you know