When my best friend Briana died, I was a young mother of two small children with a business to run. The grief was enormous, and there was nowhere to put it. Because the people who depend on you do not stop needing you the day your world falls apart. The children still need breakfast. The work still needs doing. Everyone still needs you to be okay.
So you do the thing so many of us do. You put on the brave face, and you keep everyone else standing.
The grief that has to wait
There is a particular kind of grief that belongs to the ones who hold everyone else. The mothers. The caregivers. The strong friend, the reliable one, the person the whole family leans on.
You are not allowed to come apart, because if you come apart, who holds the rest of it? So you tuck the grief away to get through the day, and the day becomes a week, and the week becomes a season, and still there has been no room to fall. The grief does not go anywhere. It waits in the body, patient and heavy, underneath the smile you keep putting on for everyone who needs you.
It is exhausting in a way that is hard to explain. You are carrying two full loads at once, the caretaking and the grief, and doing it with no one carrying you.
Slow is not the same as broken
When you can only grieve in stolen minutes, in the car before you walk inside, in the shower, in the dark after everyone is asleep, of course the grief takes longer. You are baking a cake one ingredient at a time. A little today, a little next month, whatever the day can spare. And then one day, sometimes years on, the cake is finally baked, and you taste in it something you did not expect. Something like new life. Something like being able to breathe again.
The slowness was never failure. It was the only pace your full and loving life would allow.
You are allowed to grieve where they can see
We think we are protecting our children, and the people who lean on us, by hiding it. But a child who never sees a grown-up grieve learns that grief is something to hide. A child who sees you cry, and sees you soften, and sees you come back to yourself, learns something far more precious. That love hurts when it is lost, that we survive it, and that feelings are allowed to move through a person.
You do not have to fall apart in front of them. But you are allowed to let them see the tears. You are allowed to say, I am sad today because I miss her. That is not weakness in front of the ones you hold. It is the deepest kind of teaching.
Small ways to tend it
If your grief has been waiting because everyone needs you, here are a few ways to give it a little room without setting down the ones you carry.
Let one wave through when it comes, even for a single minute, instead of swallowing it back down. Put a hand on your own chest in the car and say the name of who you lost. Draw yourself a bath and light a candle, and let the warm water hold you the way you are always holding everyone else. Ask one person to hold something for you, an hour, a meal, a nap, so you can have one afternoon to feel. And be as gentle with your own slow pace as you would be with anyone else you love.
You are holding so much. The grief is allowed to be held too.
A gentle first step
If you have been holding everyone else and quietly carrying a grief with nowhere to go, you deserve to be held too.
You can book a free discovery call, twenty unhurried minutes, no pressure and nothing to sell. Just space to set the weight down for a moment, and be heard.
A gentle note: I am a somatic and energy practitioner, not a licensed therapist or grief counselor. This work walks alongside healing and is not a replacement for therapy or medical care. If your grief feels unbearable, or you are struggling to stay safe, please reach out to a licensed professional. Many of the people I sit with do both, and that is a good and beautiful thing.
