How I learned to sit with grief

People sometimes ask how I learned to sit with grief the way I do: how I can hold the heavy things without flinching, how I can listen without needing to fix, how I can stay steady when someone's world is falling apart.

The truth is, I didn't learn it in a course. I didn't learn it in a book. My initiation began as a child.

As a child of divorce, like many, I grew up in the space between two adults who were hurting in their own ways. No one intended harm, but the impact was the same. I learned early how to navigate love that was inconsistent, confusing, or conditional. And in all of that, my mother had a favorite. I wasn't it.

There's a particular ache in realizing you are the one left waiting, the one hoping to be chosen, the one learning to contort yourself into worthiness. People sometimes call that "desperate for love." I used to believe them. But it wasn't desperation. It was survival. A child will do anything to be loved, including carrying stories that were never theirs to hold.

As I grew older, grief didn't repeat itself. It accumulated. Each chapter had its own shape, its own story, its own cost: the grief of abusive relationships, of a plane crash, of cancer, of motherhood's thresholds, of losing my dad, and the family complexities and estrangement that surfaced alongside it. Different griefs. Different wounds. Each one distinct. Each one asking something new of me.

And through all of it, something in me was being forged, not into strength, but into capacity. Into intimacy with the places most people turn away from. Into a steadiness that isn't confidence, but familiarity. I know my edges. I know what I've survived. I know what it costs to keep loving in a world that didn't always love me back.

This is why I companion the way I do. Not from theory. Not from training. But from lived grief: the kind that rearranges you, the kind that teaches you how to sit with another's ache because you learned how to carry your own when no one else knew how.

Every chapter I've walked (energy healing, end-of-life doula training, even the grounded clarity of accounting) has become part of the way I hold others. All of it lives inside the place I've built now, so you don't have to walk through your grief, your story, your pain alone.

Why I'm not afraid of the room at the end

Eventually, my father looked at me and said, "Once you become a doula, you can help me die” the only way a beloved father can say it with a mischievous smile. So I did. I supported him through Medical Assistance in Dying, alongside his hospice team. Plenty of coffee with the birds, some laughter and a bit of quiet. When he died, I was the one who prepared his body and sat with the silence after, because there weren't words for what had just happened, and there didn't need to be.

I'm telling you this so you know: when it's your turn to be in that room, I won't be new to it and I won't need you to manage my discomfort on top of your own grief. I'm not going to tell you dying is peaceful and beautiful if it isn't. Sometimes it's serene. Sometimes it's messy and undignified and nothing like the movies. I've sat with both, and I'm not going anywhere either way.