seasons of change

I’ve always been told I was “mature for my age.”

Words that followed me for decades, a badge I wore with pride (and gosh, I hope little Alice also knew she could play and not be serious all the time).

Though I quickly also learned that we’re only “mature” in the areas life has asked us to be. And in others, we’re still very much learning.

For me, loss has been one of those learning places.

These days, I’m sitting in a quiet pocket of pre-grief — the space before the loss, where you already feel the ache of what hasn’t even happened yet. It’s tender and confusing. I find myself trying to reconcile my Buddhist beliefs with very real, very human pain. I think about impermanence, acceptance, the messy existential spirals that come with loving deeply and inevitably, letting go.

What does it mean to raise a child in a world where everything changes?
To love people knowing we’ll lose them or that they’ll lose us?
To prepare for that, if preparing is even possible?

This, I think, is the practice. The practice of grief. The practice of meditation. The practice of being present. Of healing. Of showing up to the mat, to the day, to the mess of it all. Of choosing to love despite all of this.

I don’t know that anyone ever becomes “mature” in grief. I’m not sure that’s the goal. Maybe the more honest aim is to become more human in it. It asks us to show up - tender, unfinished - and let it shape us.

So if you’re carrying a little pre-grief too, or sitting with the ache of what might one day be lost… I’m right there with you, learning how to hold it all. The beauty, the fear, the fierce love, and the slow practice of letting go.

Not to fix it. Just to be with it.

And maybe that’s enough for now.

Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All the unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.

Jamie Anderson