This is the fourth in our four-part series exploring ideas and practices around conscious death and dying. – Publisher

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While death may arrive in a moment, grief unfolds over time. After the final breath, the rituals, the phone calls, the meals and the condolences, those who remain behind are left with something less visible but far more enduring: the task of living with loss. But how can people live with grief within a culture that often seems unsure of what to do with it?

Grief is Not an Illness

With industries making millions of dollars treating grief symptoms with drugs or distractions, it can be easy to think of grief as something to be eradicated. 

But Jenna Pratt, founder of Lionheart Grief Coaching, is careful to avoid using negative labels to describe grief. Instead, she offers a broad, inclusive definition: “Grief is a set of emotions surrounding an event or a person or a thing that you’ve lost. And that’s a pretty big scope. And I think it’s important for the scope to be large, because we often take away our own license to grieve.”

Grief can manifest after the death of a loved one, but also from a variety of life events like the loss of a marriage, a pet, or a future once imagined. Pratt makes sure to specify that grief is not a disorder or a sign of weakness; it is the natural response to loss.

“There are no negative or positive emotions,” she says. “They’re just signals. From a cultural standpoint, we have been conditioned to think that there are certain emotions that are less acceptable and so are therefore negative, like anger—but anger is the check engine light.” Pratt says these types of emotions exist to invite us to explore our own feelings, but when we suppress or run away from them, it can cause greater issues down the line. 

Grief is Nonlinear 

A common misconception about grief is that it follows a course of five linear stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. But Sascha Demerjian, a grief counselor and co-founder of The Grief House in Decatur, says that grief is “definitely not linear.” Moreover, she says the grief response varies a lot from person to person. Some people even seem to have no effects of grief right after a loss at all, only to have symptoms arise years later. 

Pratt agrees. “I think the big misnomer is that these stages almost feel like stepping stones. So there will be tons of people asking, ‘Well, what stage are you [in]?’ As if you have somehow overcome denial and now you’re in the anger phase.” This false idea leads to people thinking they aren’t “grieving correctly” if they experience certain grief-related emotions persisting months—or years—after the fact. And that can often trigger shame or guilt. 

Pratt prefers to liken the process of grieving to circling up a mountain. “Yes, you are circling the same mountain, but you’re touching different parts of it as you move,” she says. Its recurring nature, she stresses, is not a sign of failure but a normal way for grief to progress. Through repeated interactions with grief, one learns how to better navigate its intense emotions. 

The work, she says, is in learning to “pause, reflect, respond” when these emotions surface, treating them as signals rather than setbacks. “Integrating a loss is about acknowledging what was and acknowledging what is and weaving them into the present.”

A Spectrum of Support: From One-on-One to Community

Because grief is unique to each person, the systems of support also vary. Professionals in the field offer different approaches, allowing individuals to find a fit for their needs.

Pratt’s Lionheart Grief Coaching, for instance, focuses on a one-on-one coaching model centered on providing tools and reflective dialogue, and offers a free consultation with prospective clients. Her approach is “faith agnostic,” as she welcomes all beliefs and focuses on integration rather than cure. 

In contrast, The Grief House, co-founded by Demerjian, emphasizes communal, group-based support. Offerings range from grief circles to yoga, writing groups and potluck dinners. “People who are deep in grief just need to be able to be there, but maybe don’t want to be alone while doing it,” Demerjian says. “Sometimes the best medicine is just having your story heard and honored.”

Kelly Sklare, a certified nurse midwife, found support in the Grief House community after losing both parents. “Being able to share without feeling shame, and then also to be able to witness other people’s grief … It’s almost alchemy that happens,” she says. To her, the key to being comfortable “walking with loss,” as she describes it, is community. 

“Through being around other people, their loss … helps me realize [grief] isn’t something you get through—it’s something that enriches and informs my life.” Being around others, she says, is so important for drawing one’s emotions out and into the world where they can be acknowledged and unpacked. 

Rituals and Integration

The following are the other three articles in our series on Death, Dying and Grief.

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Enacting rituals is a powerful tool for this integration, with the rituals themselves acting as ways to externalize feelings. Pratt’s own practice includes building nature mandalas using heart-shaped rocks found on hikes on the anniversary of her son’s death. These tokens are reminders that “something beautiful happened, which is the life of my son. And also life is temporary, and therefore it is precious.” By externalizing these feelings, she says that she and those she works with are better able to process and respond to them. 

Alternate Modalities for Grief Management

In addition to grief coaches and counselors, other practices can ease the pains that often accompany grief. One such example is PSYCH-K, a psychological methodology aimed at rewiring a subject’s subconscious mind to align with their conscious goals. Through this, subjects are reportedly able to make massive progress in breaking unhealthy habits, creating healthy alternatives, and, crucially, rewiring the way they think about specific subjects or events. 

Linda Minnick, an Atlanta-based development coach and PSYCH-K facilitator, has used the practice to target the subconscious beliefs that can make grieving so disruptive. “My brother passed not too long ago, and I was pretty angry with him because he was dying, because he had been abusing his body for years,” she says. This anger made it difficult for her to appreciate memories of her brother after his passing, and so she focused on the mantra of “I forgive you for leaving us this way.” 

PSYCH-K works by creating a statement, such as Minnick’s about forgiveness, and repeating it during a series of muscle tests to determine how much one’s subconscious supports or conflicts with that statement. If there’s conflict, a PSYCH-K practitioner guides the subject through a series of “balances” whose purpose is to get the “goal statement to a zero level, which means there is no emotion attached to it,” she says.

It’s normal and healthy for there to be some amount of lingering melancholy when grief is present, says Minnick, but the goal is to remove the paralyzing pain, shame or guilt that can arise alongside the grief. In her own example, she is now able to feel appreciative of the time she had with her brother, despite his not leaving the way she would have preferred. “The difference is, you’re not punishing yourself.” 

When Is the Right Time To Seek Grief Support? 

While grief can be accompanied by pain, guilt, or shame, all of the professionals interviewed made it clear that the grieving process itself is healthy and normal. However, depending upon a variety of factors involved, grief can sometimes be dangerously paralyzing. 

Minnick and Kristin Tansey, a certified Emotion Code, Body Code and Belief Code practitioner, mention that grief can interrupt some people’s ability to engage with the world, their work and the people in their lives. While grief can bring melancholy, it should not cause long-term disruption. By bridging the gap between our conscious and subconscious minds, Tansey says we can bring our emotional and physical states “into a state of balance for healing.” She also says we can “bring our bodies into a state of balance for healing.”

Tansey sees grief in the context of other emotions. “Grief and the associated emotions often cause or contribute to the buildup of ‘heart walls’ that prevent the individual from moving forward. Heart walls consist of layers of trapped emotions that surround the heart like armor. These walls interfere with relationships, giving and receiving, creating and achieving goals.” Specifically, unprocessed grief often manifests as physical imbalances and pain, she says.

Sklare was drawn to the Grief House after the death of her mother, saying she “knew that it could help with the general grief that touches us all as humans.” Spaces like that offered at the Grief House were ideal for her to find healing and support through community. At the same time, she recognizes that individualized support is sometimes called for. “If I was showing signs of depression or the inability to truly engage in my life,” says Sklare, “I would seek out professional support from a grief-informed therapist.”

Minnick agrees, recommending that the time to seek help is when grief has become a constant companion and starts affecting the choices one makes.

The Other Side of Grief

The consensus is clear: the goal is not to reach a finish line where grief is gone, but to develop a sustainable relationship with it. Demerjian warns against solutions that promise to “resolve it, or get you through it fast.” 

Pratt agrees, stating that a client who wants to be completely “done with grief” is not the best fit for coaching. She shares a moment where, at a wedding party, she broke into tears during the mother-son dance as she realized she would never have this moment with her own departed son. “It was tough in the moment, and I let it happen, and I felt much better. I didn’t run away from it. I didn’t go and try and hide or pretend that I was okay, and the moment passed and I was okay,” says Pratt. By familiarizing herself with grief, Pratt is able to experience these emotions without them destabilizing her life, her work, or her self-image. 

Paradoxically, Sklare says that embracing grief has expanded her capacity for joy. “I never, ever could believe that touching the tender parts of me and being a witness for other people’s most tender moments could give me a sense of just authenticity and joy,” she says. “I feel like I’m living in purpose.”

Ultimately, living with grief is about integration, not eradication. It is about making space for a lifelong dialogue with loss, honoring its presence, and allowing it to coexist with a full, changing life. As Jenna Pratt’s circling the mountain analogy illustrates, we may revisit the same core of loss, but we are never in the same place twice. The terrain changes, and so do we. ❧

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Noah Chen is a writer and journalist who covers health, culture and media. He splits his time between New York City and Atlanta. He’s probably working out of a coffee shop right now.