CW: suicide loss, grief, trauma responses No one told me grief would begin to live in my body or that it would impact my nervous system for the foreseeable future. Once I was able to accept what had happened, I expected the sadness. I expected the crying, the fog, the heaviness that makes getting out of bed feel like an athletic event. What I didn't expect was the way my body would change — the way it would start responding to the world differently, like it had been reprogram

CW: suicide loss, grief For a long time after my dad died, I was a detective. I replayed conversations. I analyzed text messages. I interrogated my own memories like a witness who couldn't keep her story straight. What did he say that Tuesday? Did his voice sound different? Was that comment a clue I missed? I wasn't just grieving. I was investigating. I thought if I could just figure out why, something would click into place. The chaos would organize itself into a narrative t

Content Warning: Suicide loss, grief, death You probably know someone who has lost a loved one to suicide. Actually, let me say that differently. More than 42% of American adults know someone who has died by suicide. That's nearly half of us. Over 48,000 Americans die by suicide every year. That means approximately 135 people today. And by some estimates, each suicide loss profoundly affects at least 135 other people. ( American Foundation for Suicide Prevention ) Photo: Aaro

(Part 2 of 2) In Part 1, we looked at how grief—both personal and collective—carries sacred information about what we're losing and what matters most. We looked at how our culture struggles to hold space for even tangible losses, let alone the perceived, energetic, and collective grief we're all carrying. We named the grief of late-stage capitalism and how the system that creates our grief also denies us time to feel it. Now, the question becomes: what (tf) do we do with all