‘I don’t have much knowledge in grief’

Over the past few weeks, I have found myself wanting to re-visit the river estuaries of my childhood. The playground for the first five years of my life was the wildness of the Dengie Marshes in Essex. We then moved further inland, up the estuary of the river Blackwater, for the rest of my childhood until I left home. Estuaries have their own solemn, constantly changing magic. For me, swimming, sailing in my neighbour’s boat, fish and chips on the Prom, under the gaze of the bronze statue of Byrhtnoth, or sitting at The Lock for an early breakfast. But mostly just walking for hours, everywhere that the adventure led.

And yet something slightly troubled me this morning. I had assumed that this touch of nostalgia that I’d recently been experiencing, could easily be remedied by a trip back to those fish and chips, or a breakfast, while wandering and gazing over those mesmerising tidal flows. 

But now I know that it wasn’t just that.

I think what has been calling me over these past weeks is some unattended grief.

Grief is one of the hardest emotions to access and yet it is baked into almost every part of our lives. Every relationship eventually experiences loss. Every transition, every change, even good ones, carry loss. But we don’t know how to talk about it, and I think that is because we have not grown up learning griefs lexicon. Why, given how much more we speak about emotional subjects these days, including many aspects of mental health, the rise of countless forms of therapy, and the availability of coaching of every flavour, is it hard to talk about grief? We can talk more easily about life’s huge disappointments, or trauma, anger, anxiety, overwhelm and depression.

However, grief requires an intentional journey to disorienting, unfamiliar, less consciously-known places. The poet and writer, Rilke uses powerfully expressive metaphors, to get close to the challenge of facing grief. 

‘It’s possible I am pushing through solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I see no way through,
and no space: everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.

I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you[1]’.

It is indeed a feared, dark and unknown place for many of us. We neither want to visit or linger there for long with ourselves, or with others experiencing grief. It is a ‘knowledge’ we have not studied for.

Why is that? A couple of reasons come to mind.

The loss of community is the first. Communities used to have a shared knowledge of the processes of grief embedded in their shared existence. Whether it was wearing black, sitting Shiva, gathering around the coffin and sharing stories, there was a more natural conversation about loss. These communities did understand something of sharing grief, but of course this isn’t the whole of the story, because these same communities have taught us that ‘real men don’t cry’, ‘man-up and move on’. ‘Don’t get mawkish, introspective and self-pitying’.

A second reason for finding grief so difficult is that we must be one of, if not the most distracted generations that has ever lived. Any micro moment of silence is uncomfortable and must be numbed by reaching for our screens to distract us…from ourselves. 

Screens demand our attention!

They have been designed to do so. It is a lot easier to be distracted than to acknowledge the silences of your neglected soul, where grief lies quietly, but also invites your attention if you approach it kindly. We don’t sit…just sit, easily with uncomfortable feelings, get curious, or gently interrogate our inner caverns with a kind conversation. 

Thirdly, it is easier to talk about emotions that have labels – anger, anxiety, trauma, depression – than to sit with and journey with a feeling that often has no name. Often grief is the real underlying emotion, beneath the familiar, named emotions. Richard Rohr once boldly asserted that of most of the angry men he had ever worked with, the real underlying emotion turned out to be grief. Anger you can name. It is familiar. But what is grief? 

Personally, I have been profoundly grateful for the elders in my life who do know the lexicon of grief. They can see it, spot it, and help you to be with it, rather than avoid or rush through it. As well as people I know personally, I have been profoundly helped by the authors and therapists Francis Weller and Stephen Levine[2]. It was the wisdom of both elder-friends and books, that helped me stop and ask why was I honestly finding myself longing to get back to the estuary right now?  

A little while ago I touched within myself a deep feeling of loss – the loss of my childhood. By 10 years old, in certain aspects of my little soul, I was forced to become an adult. I lost dimensions of those years of childhood in a bunch of ways. Recently I had allowed myself to touch that loss and then it seemed to evaporate. The feeling was real, for sure, but it had gone from view.

Grief is good at that. It goes from view, so you kid yourself all is fine now, but it never actually goes, it just waits until it feels safe enough to come out and talk. I knew it hadn’t gone, but I could no longer locate it. Until yesterday, when I connected this newly emerged longing for the estuary, the place of….my childhood. And then I reconnected with the loss.  Only attended sorrow can yield its healing and release that trapped life energy for more benefit to myself and my little patch of the world.

With Rilke, I am learning the language of grief and feel unbelievably better for it, even though the journey is often hard.

TW July 2026

[1] Rainer Maria Rilke, “Pushing Through” in Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. and ed. Robert Bly   New York: Harper and Row, 1981

[2] The Wild Edge Of Sorrow       Francis Weller; Unattended Sorrow      Stephen Levine