Living with the Ashes and the Grief That Comes Later

A return to what was taken — and the truth that sets us free

Some grief doesn’t come right away.

It waits. Beneath the coping, the survival, the striving. Beneath the life built on top of what was never mourned. It waits until we are strong enough. Safe enough. Until the scaffolding finally loosens and we can bear witness — not just to what happened, but to what was taken.

There’s a particular kind of grief that arrives not for the event itself, but for what it quietly stole from us:
Our innocence. Our autonomy. Our softness, maybe. Our trust.
Our sense of possibility. Our ability to believe in our own enoughness.

And the pain doesn’t fully land until one day, years later, we look at ourselves — worn but wiser — and whisper, It wasn’t my fault.

That’s when grief finds its opening. When we stop minimizing. When we stop justifying what hurt us. When we name it — not in rage, but in clarity.
This was wrong. This should not have happened.

And then: we feel it. In our own timing. In our own language.

Not to relive it.
But to reclaim something sacred from the rubble.

—

I am entering a season of what old Scandinavian traditions called “living with aches” — a mourning season where one walks with grief rather than trying to overcome it. Not as a collapse, but as a form of courage. A reclamation.

For me, this means working through losses that have gone unattended for more than 20 years. Losses I couldn’t yet name. Losses I had to survive.
Most of all, the loss of knowing who I might have become had I never been assaulted.

To live with the ashes is to choose not to set grief aside, but to let it speak — and teach. I will be walking with this grief not to dwell in it forever, but so I don’t have to carry its unprocessed pain in silence, in my bones, in my bloodline. So others don’t have to.

This is not passive. This is practice.

I’ll be sitting with ritual.
Listening for language.
Leaning into solitude and seeking community.
Forging a relationship with my losses — and thereby, with the deeper chambers of my own soul.

Francis Weller writes:

“It is our unexpressed sorrows, the congested stories of loss, that, when left unattended, block our access to the soul. To be able to freely move in and out of the soul's inner chambers, we must first clear the way.”

This is the path I’m on. A path of clearing, not to erase the past — but to finally see it, hold it, and honour what it cost.

We don’t grieve what never mattered.
We grieve what was precious.
What was ours.
What we are now ready to call back.

This grief doesn’t undo us.
It unfreezes us.

It restores us to ourselves — soft part by soft part.

If something in this has stirred you —
if grief has brushed the edges of your life,
or you too are carrying losses that never had space to be named —
I see you.

You are not too late.
You are not broken for still feeling what the world told you to forget.
You are simply arriving at the right time — your time — to begin a new kind of relationship with what was lost.

If it feels right, you might sit with this:

What am I still carrying that never had space to be mourned?
Or more simply:
What pain have I silenced — and is it ready to speak now?

Let it come gently.
This is not a fixing. It’s a listening.

And sometimes, that’s where the healing begins.