Diagnosis: Grief

There are many things true about humans but the most honest thing is we all burden the same weight. Different loads, at different times. Different cargo, sure. But the more people I work with, the truer it becomes.

We talk about “root cause” in Chinese medicine. Every AI voice is spreading it like the Palisades fires — we don’t just treat your symptoms, we treat the root cause. It sounds like selling. In my early days of practice I sold a dozen of those.

But now. I don’t think we treat anything. I think we create space to allow what’s in to move out. What’s hollowed to be filled.

And I think a lot of what is full and what is empty is a result of grief somewhere down the line. Maybe in this life, maybe in another. Maybe from 10 years ago, maybe from 10 minutes ago.

Grief is the absence of.

In Chinese medicine, grief lives in the Lung. The breath shortens. The chest closes slightly forward. The body organizes around the loss the way water finds the lowest point and stays there.

You breathe out and you can’t seem to breathe back in.

The grief of what’s gone is killing what’s yet to exist.

We grieve the obvious things. Death. Endings.

We grieve a version of someone we loved who no longer exists — or maybe never did — and because we never buried that person properly, we can’t let anyone who is actually in front of us all the way in.

We grieve the career we didn’t choose, and so we hold ourselves prisoner in the one we did.

We grieve the childhood we deserved but didn’t get, and so we keep returning to relationships that feel familiar instead of ones that feel good. Familiarity fooled for love.

We grieve the things we wish we’d said. And then we convince ourselves it’s too late, so we never say them. And the silence calcifies. And we carry it everywhere.

And sometimes we grieve the last bite of a really good meal, not because the food but because who you were with. So you’ll long for that taste, you’ll go back to that restaurant, you’ll order the same thing. But it won’t taste the same.

And then there is the grief we can’t even name. The thing we sense but won’t look at directly. The question we keep almost asking ourselves in the dark and then don’t.

We grieve things we don’t even know yet. We fear what we might find if we actually went looking.

There is a space in between. Between what’s gone and what’s coming. Between the truth we’re afraid of and the life we haven’t let ourselves imagine. That space is where freedom lives. It always has been.

But our hearts are heavy and our ankles are chained. So we put on a blindfold. Because it’s easier to be blind to the life we could be living than to stand in the open and not know yet what it will become.

Rather than running through the meadow of blooming wildflowers, we post up in the desert depriving ourselves of life until the mirages appear and tell ourselves they’re ghosts coming to visit us, to tell us a message. But angels like fresh air too.

I wrote recently about my mother visiting. She has new wrinkles. I counted them like someone returning to a house and noticing, only now, that the paint has changed. She reached for a napkin before my spilled coffee could commit to the table. Thirty years of practice. The reflex of a woman who has spent her life wiping things up and calling it love.

We were cataloguing each other — looking for the dead in the living, finding them, saying nothing about what that means. I wanted to ask about my dad. About the divorce. I didn’t.

Some grief we keep so long it stops feeling like grief. It just feels like us.

And maybe that’s because language was never really equipped for any of this. We put words to things and call them feelings. Grief. Longing. Love. Loss. We name them like naming is the same as knowing. But what do we really know? We don’t. We feel. The body was always ahead of the word. The word just arrives later, trying to take credit.

So now what, “doctor”?

I really don’t know the answer.

But I do know that it feels nice to take the blindfold off. It’s really nice to take off your shoes and run from the cactus and into the grass and drink from the river. I know what it feels like to hold a hurting hand and have mine held too. I know that grief heals from grace. From accepting. From allowing. To be forgiving, is freeing. I know that when you stop holding your pain so tight, you can really catch your breath. I know that words are beautiful and I use them a lot, just like right now, but I don’t know if they capture what I feel. But I do know I feel something.

I hope they make you feel too.