✦ Slow Sips — a seed, a pause, and seven invitations into your own story.
My father passed away on New Year's Day.
Since then I have felt like a man lost at sea. The water is vast and some days the shore feels very far. But here is the thing I have had to learn to say out loud, because I think the silence around it costs something:
The water is not made only of sadness.
It is also made of relief.
That admission can feel dangerous. It runs counter to the script we've been handed for grief — the one that prefers mourning to be clean, unambiguous, and easily recognizable. Relief doesn't fit that script. So we edit it out. We offer the world the version of our loss that makes sense, that garners the right response, that doesn't require explanation.
But relief is not the absence of love.
It is a specific mercy. The quiet acknowledgment that a long struggle has reached its final shore. The easing of a vigilance held for years. The body recognizing it no longer has to brace for the next crisis.
When we deny relief, we turn grief into performance.
When we allow it, we return grief to the body where it belongs.
I don't think I'm alone in this. I think a lot of people are carrying an ocean that doesn't look the way they were told it should. Loss that comes mixed with freedom. Grief that arrives alongside something that feels uncomfortably like peace. Mourning that refuses to be only one thing.
You don't owe the world a simplified version of your heart.
The water holds everything. You are allowed to let it.
SEVEN INVITATIONS
Is there a loss in your life — of a person, a relationship, a version of yourself — that came with feelings you didn't expect and couldn't easily name?
What part of your grief have you been editing out because it doesn't fit the story you thought you were supposed to tell?
Relief, freedom, peace, ambivalence — have you ever felt one of these alongside sorrow and then felt guilty for it? What would it mean to stop apologizing for the complexity?
Who in your life knows the full version of what you're carrying — not the simplified one? What does it feel like to be fully witnessed in your grief?
Think of a long struggle — yours or someone you loved — that finally reached its shore. What did that arriving feel like in your body?
Whose grief in your life looks different from yours? What would it mean to let their ocean be its own shape without needing it to match yours?
What would you say to yourself — or to someone you love — if you could give full permission to feel everything the water actually contains?
If something in here is pulling at a story you've been carrying — I'd love to help you find the words that are actually yours. Visit the Story House website HERE
If this landed somewhere in you — I'd love to hear where. Leave a comment below.
And if you want to go deeper — The Porch is where this work lives fully. It's a small, close circle of people who are serious about story. Come sit with us.