Hello There,
Grief does not just show up at funerals.
It shows up when your child grows up and the little version of him is gone forever, even while you love the man he is becoming. It shows up when a friendship changes shape, when a dream shifts into something you did not picture, when a season of your life quietly ends. None of that requires a death to count as real grief, and none of it comes with a timeline, no matter what anyone has told you about stages and schedules.
And I also need to talk honestly about the other kind. I have friends who have buried their children. There is no framework that makes that make sense and no schedule where that grief resolves on time, and I am not putting the small griefs and the catastrophic ones on the same shelf and calling them equal. Both are real. Both are love with nowhere to go. Neither one gets judged against the other’s timeline.
In this episode I go deep on the neuroscience of why grief lives physically in your nervous system and why suppressed grief resurfaces later in ways that seem unrelated to the original loss. The river and the dried up lake, and what happens to love when it has nowhere left to flow. A story from someone I interviewed who lost his son and built one of the biggest fundraisers in his community in his son’s name, keeping his son’s memory alive every single year. And Jesus weeping at Lazarus’s tomb, even knowing the resurrection was seconds away, because knowing something good is coming does not cancel the need to grieve fully first.
Your feelings are valid. There is no timeline. And when you are ready, not before, your loss can become the exact place your greatest potential begins.
Go listen.
Branden LaNette
Podcast Coach
BrandenLaNette.com