I've Lost More People Than I Know What To Do With (So I Built Something)

There's an…indescribable feeling that comes with being a person who has lost a lot of people (and animals).

Like you become aware at some point, your realize your grief list is getting long enough that it starts to sound like a bit much. Like you're making it up, or competing, or asking for something. And so you learn to mention it carefully, or not at all, or with a kind of pre-emptive apology in your voice. I know, I know. It's a lot.

It is a lot. And I've never quite known what to do with that.

My grandpa Jack (real name Robert John but he went by Jack, or John) my mom's dad, the grandfather I was actually close to, died a few years before my mom. I missed his passing because my parents told me not to come visit because he was doing okay (spoiler: he was not and then he died). And I wasn't even told about his celebration of life or whatever ‘til after the fact! I only actually found out years later. Like WTF…?! Families, am I right?!

Then my mom died, December 2015. And that, as they say, was that.

That's when I started doing yoga every single day: January 1st, 2016, because I needed somewhere to put my body when my body didn't know what to do with itself. I've written about this before. The yoga mat as the only place I could be fully present and fully falling apart at the same time. (Both things. Somehow, both things.)

My grandma, my mom's mom — went in 2020. Right in the middle of everything else going on in the world and because it was peak Covid, I wasn't able to say goodbye in person, which meant the grief was sort of folded into the general ambient horror of that particular year. It’s kinda like she didn’t really die…she just…disappeared. Because there was no closure whatsoever. Which is its own strange thing. Your personal losses blurring into the collective ones until you can barely find the seams.

Then 2021 happened.

My aunt and my uncle — both within six months of each other. I'm not going to dress that up. Six months. Two people who'd been woven into the fabric of my whole life, gone inside half a year. I remember thinking: how is this allowed? Who approved this? Surely there are rules. My aunt I couldn't visit because, again, still peak Covid. So no real closure with my Grandpa, Grandma or Aunt, that I wasn't able to say goodbye to in person before they died. My uncle lived on the other side of the country and had a heart attack, so no goodbyes there, obviously.

And somewhere in there, between all of it — Bailey my dog in 2019, my first dog as an adult. And then Penny in 2021 (we called her our Pendemic dog…get it?). And I know some people do the thing where they say "oh, she's just talking about dogs", but those people have clearly never lost a dog, and I have nothing to say to them. Bailey and Penny were family. Full stop. They are/were our furbabies.

So. That's my grief list. Oh wait. And there’s my other Aunt who passed away in October last year. One of my dad’s sisters. So there’s that too.

I'm not sharing it to make you sad, or to win something, or because I think my losses are more significant than yours. I'm sharing it because I think a lot of us are walking around with lists like this, and we've gotten very good at carrying them quietly.. quietly isn't quite the right word, because grief is rarely quiet; it just learns to be private).

And so, I've built The Grief Companion because of all of it. Because of every time I've reached for something and found nothing quite right.

Here's what I've noticed, across all the different flavours of loss on my list:

Grief is not one thing.

It's not even a few things.

It's a whole range of things that don't always have names, and that change not just over time but over the course of a single afternoon. You can be okay at 2pm and absolutely not okay at 4pm and then sort of okay again by dinner, and this is not a malfunction. This is just what grief does.

And the other thing I've noticed is that what I've needed most, in most of those moments, wasn't advice. Wasn't steps. Wasn't even comfort, exactly.

It was to feel like someone saw what I was carrying.

That's it. Just — I see it. I see you holding that.

That's what The Grief Companion is trying to do.

It's a free tool, built for everyone. No sign-up, no paywall, no wellness-speak. You answer two questions — where you are in your grief (early, long, complicated, anticipatory), and how you're carrying it today (heavy, numb, angry, tender, okay-ish-and-guilty-about-it, somewhere in between). And then it gives you three things: a witnessed reflection, some language for what you might be feeling, and one gentle practice.

That's the whole thing.

I wrote all 24 results (outputs?) myself. Because I wanted it to sound like a person, not a program. I wanted it to sound like someone who has actually been in the bathroom crying and then choking on hot tea (not in the bathroom).

There's a response in there for anticipatory grief too - for the people who are grieving something that hasn't happened yet, which is one of the loneliest positions a person can be in, and one that almost nobody talks about. (I think about that now. The weeks before my mom died. And when we knew we had to say bye to Bailey our Border Collie at 15 years old. The grief that was already happening before the loss was real.)

There's a response for the okay-ish days. The ones where you feel almost fine and then feel terrible about feeling almost fine. Which…yeah. Those days exist. They're allowed.

There's a response for the people who are angry. Because grief anger is real and valid and so often gets shamed out of people before it's had a chance to do anything useful.

And there are links, at the end of each response, to essays and podcast episodes from The Lantern Path — my full grief and loss archive here on Dose of Wonder — in case you want to go deeper. Or just want to know someone's been thinking about these things for a while.

I've been carrying grief for a long time now. I'm not done with it and I probably never will be. I've just gotten, maybe, a little better at not requiring it to look a particular way or happen on a particular schedule.

Bailey taught me that grief is grief, whatever the shape of what you've lost.

My mom taught me that grief can become a doorway, if you let it. That's not toxic positivity. It took years, and a yoga mat, and a lot of self compassion. But it's true.

My grandpa John/Jack taught me that being funny right up until the end is a perfectly good approach to life, and that the people who love you will cry in the bathroom.

Go check out The Grief Companion. It's free. It's for you. It'll take about two minutes and ask nothing of you except honesty about where you are today.

You don't have to perform fine here.

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