Grief as a Lantern: Honoring Love, Loss, and Our Shared Humanity

Two years have passed since my father left this world, and yet grief still moves through me like a tide, receding some days, crashing on others. Today, writing this on the anniversary of his passing, the waves are high.

I miss him with a sharpness that refuses to dull: his wisdom layered with an incisive and often surprising humor, his fierce devotion to truth, his endless supply of well researched stories about history, philosophy and art, the classical music he loved. I miss listening to Bach beside him, watching mama bear and her cubs wander through the yard, talking about T.S. Eliot’s poems about cats, or simply sharing silence in the glow of his presence.

To live without his voice is to walk with an emptiness that never entirely closes. And yet, as I move through grief, I find that the only way forward is through ritual, through tending.

This morning, I worked out until my body felt alive, then moved between sauna heat and the shock of a cold plunge. I fed the goats, who always remind me of balance and stubborn joy. I cuddled my sweet dog, kissed my soft purring cats, listened to the music my father and I once shared. I lit a candle, prayed, cried, and wrote in my journal. I fasted, not from deprivation but from intention, a clearing, a way to sharpen the edges of my mourning into presence. Each act was a small lantern in the darkness. Together, they became a path.

Personal grief is never just personal. As I sat with the loss of my father, I also felt the weight of another sorrow: for our country, for our shared humanity, for the empathy and decency unraveling thread by thread. With September 11th upon us, I am reminded that grief belongs not only to individuals but to nations. That day carved a collective wound we still carry, a reminder that tragedy can either deepen our compassion or harden our divisions. We stand at that choice point still.

I mourn not only the absence of my father’s voice but also the silencing of voices across this nation, the erosion of truth and compassion, the steady chipping away at rights once taken for granted, the fading ability to see one another as fully human.

Grief, whether for a person or for a country, comes from love. We only grieve what we cherish. My father’s devotion to truth and reason makes me feel his absence all the more in this season when lies and cruelty flood our daily lives.

Grief doesn’t vanish. It demands tending, like a fire that can warm us if we care for it or burn us if ignored. As a life coach, I often encourage clients not to push grief away but to let it move through them. These practices, the ones I leaned on today, may help you too:

• Move your body. Exercise, stretch, walk, or dance. Movement releases what words cannot.
• Seek nature and animals. There is grounding in tending a garden, walking barefoot on grass, or receiving the unconditional presence of a pet.
• Lean into music and memory. Play the songs you shared with your loved one. Let them carry you across time.
• Create ritual. Light a candle, say a prayer, draw a card. Ritual offers form to the formless ache.
• Express what’s inside. Journal, paint, cry without shame. Grief needs outlets, not cages.
• Nourish with intention. Whether fasting, feasting, or simply choosing wholesome foods, treat your body as an ally in grief’s journey.

There is no one right way. What matters is choosing presence over avoidance.

If we learn to honor personal grief with compassion and courage, perhaps we can also learn to honor our collective grief. We can grieve not just what we have lost but also what we are losing. We can choose not to let that grief harden us into bitterness but open us into action, into tenderness with each other, into a renewed fight for empathy, truth, and justice.

My father taught me that grief is not the end of love. It is love’s echo. And love, if we let it, can become a bridge, between the living and the dead, between strangers, between fractured communities.

So today, I mourn. For my father. For this country. For the fragile threads of humanity that feel stretched too thin. But I also choose to honor that grief with movement, with ritual, with hope.

May we all learn to carry grief not as a stone that sinks us, but as a lantern that guides us. May we light candles not only for those we’ve lost, but for the compassion and courage we must keep alive.

Because grief, if we let it, can awaken us to what matters most.