Grief as Prophecy: What Our Losses Are Trying to Tell Us

(Part 1 of 2)

This two-part series explores grief as sacred information rather than something to simply "get through." In Part 1, we'll look at what our personal and collective losses are trying to tell us. In Part 2, we'll explore how to work with grief as a teacher and guide toward healing. What if grief isn't something to get through, but something to listen to and to be guided by?

Photo by Anthony Lim / Unsplash What can I say? We live in a culture that treats grief like a problem to solve, a phase to complete, a wound to close as quickly as possible. But what if our grief—both personal and collective—is actually trying to tell us something essential about what matters most?

Grief as Sacred Information

In the recovery community, particularly in one where I am active, Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACA), there's a powerful concept embedded in the Bill of Rights: the right to grieve real and perceived losses. Tony A. and the ACA fellowship developed this framework to help folks recognize that our grief is valid, whether the loss is tangible or not.

But I think it gets even more interesting than that. If we have the right to grieve perceived losses—losses of safety, innocence, trust, or what could have been—then grief becomes more than just a response to death or concrete endings. It becomes a compass pointing us toward what we're missing, what we need, what the world needs. How might we see- and maybe more importantly, feel- grief as prophecy?

Think about it! When we grieve the loss of a sense of safety in our communities, that grief is telling us something about our deep human need for security and connection. When we mourn the innocence we've lost watching systems of oppression continue unchecked, that grief carries information about our values and our longing for justice.

The Prophecy in Our Collective Mourning

Right now, we're experiencing waves of collective grief that our culture doesn't know how to hold. Eco-grief. Democratic grief. The grief of watching harm continue while feeling complicit and powerless to stop it.

What does widespread eco-anxiety tell us? It's not just fear. It's grief for what we're losing and what future generations will never know. Ancient forests. Stable seasons. The ordinary miracle of predictable weather patterns. This grief is prophetic—it's showing us exactly where our attention and healing energy need to flow.

When communities experience democratic grief—the mourning of institutions and norms we thought were stable—that loss reveals what we actually value about collective decision-making, representation, and justice. The grief tells us what's at stake.

And when we feel the weight of being unable to stop violence, whether it's war, police brutality, or systems that grind people down, that helpless feeling sits in our bodies as unprocessed grief. It's grief for our own innocence, yes, but also for every life lost and every person harmed.

When Society Can't Validate Tangible Loss

Here's the challenge we're facing: we live in a society that struggles to acknowledge even the most concrete losses. I heard recently that workplaces usually offer three days of bereavement leave. We're expected to "bounce back" in three days?! We're told not to be "too sensitive" about things that break our hearts. Some folks do not even share with their close coworkers about losses because they might be viewed as weak.

If we can't collectively honor the death of a loved one, the end of a marriage, or the loss of a beloved animal companion—tangible, undeniable losses—what does that mean for our capacity to process perceived, energetic, and collective losses? (It doesn't look great.)

It means we're trying to grieve on hard mode. We're being asked to process losses that our culture doesn't even have language for, in a society that barely tolerates mourning the losses everyone can see.

This creates a crisis of spirit. When we can't name what we're losing—a sense of shared reality, trust in institutions, faith in our collective future, the feeling that things will be okay—we end up carrying that unacknowledged grief in our bodies. It shows up as anxiety, rage, numbness, or that pervasive, eerie sense that something is deeply wrong but we can't quite name it.

The Grief We Can't Afford to Feel: Late-Stage Capitalism and the Hustle Trap

Plus! Many of us are so busy hustling just to survive that we literally don't have time to grieve.

There's a concept in Underearners Anonymous, another community I have the benefit of participating in, called "Exertion/Exhaustion"—when we habitually overwork, become exhausted, then under-work or cease work completely. It's a cycle that keeps so many of us trapped. We work ourselves to the bone, crash, recover just enough to start the cycle again. And somewhere in that endless loop, a heap of grief gets stuck.

How can we be present with the grief of overworking when we're too overworked to stop? How do we process the loss of rest, the loss of ease, the loss of time with loved ones, when stopping long enough to feel it might mean we can't pay rent?

This is the grief of late-stage capitalism itself. We're grieving:

• The loss of sustainable work-life balance

• Time we'll never get back with our children, partners, friends

• Our health sacrificed to productivity

• Creative dreams deferred indefinitely

• The fantasy that hard work would lead to security

• Community connection traded for survival mode

• The ability to rest without guilt or financial terror
  

And I think this might be the cruelest part of it...the system that creates this grief also denies us the time and space to process it. We're told to be grateful we have jobs at all. We're sold "self-care" products instead of living wages and reasonable working conditions. We're expected to meditate our way through systemic exploitation.

The grief is real. The exhaustion is real. And we don't have time to feel either one—which means both get stored in our bodies, our relationships, our communities, creating layers of unprocessed loss that we carry like invisible weight.

This, too, is prophetic grief. When we finally allow ourselves to feel the weight of what this economic system costs us, that grief tells us exactly what needs to change. It points us toward visions of collective care, mutual aid, and economic systems that value human thriving over endless extraction.

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So now we're carrying all of this—personal losses, collective mourning, grief we can't name, grief we can't afford to feel. It's overwhelming. It's heavy. And our culture keeps telling us to just push through it.

But what if there's another way? What if this grief, as unbearable as it feels, is actually trying to show us something?

In Part 2, I'd like to explore how to work with grief as a teacher and guide—and where our losses are pointing us toward healing.

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Part 2 coming soon. If you're carrying heavy grief right now, visit reikifortoday.com to learn about reiki for grief and transition, and support and listening services for those grieving.