13/06/2026
Brene Brown reminds us that we can't categorically shut down emotion. You can't just shut down sadness, alone. If you shut down sadness, you are also shutting down joy. If you shut down one thing, you're shutting down all of it.
I have experienced this in many ways in my life but it's particularly stark at this stage in the grieving process. I'm not a shutter-downer (quite the opposite with my emotions) but if I happen to go a day without crying, the next day I end up feeling flattened, numb, meh.
The crying *itself* is profoundly awkward and uncomfortable. I don't like how it feels. But like clockwork in the hours after I have a good cry, the "flat-numb-meh" feelings dissipate and I can reconnect to glimmers of joy, like giving the dogs ice cream (their faces!), a line of poetry, the slant of the sun as it sets.
My father's cremains arrived in the mail today. The shipping box was even marked for it on the outside, which is I suppose a postal regulation of some kind but still it was an odd feeling that the postal carrier doing the delivery knew something intimate and vulnerable about me as he left the box at my door.
I cried when I opened the box. My dad--so much bigger than the whole sky--now what's left of him just ashes in a box.
It's so weird.
But I suppose I share all of this because I think as a society many people are holding their breath around their grief. The past five years in particular have been so very hard. We think that we need to keep it together, to keep on keeping on, that if we really let ourselves feel the full weight of it all that we'll fall apart.
I don't think you'll fall apart. I think it will feel that way in the moment, then the moment will pass, then you will look out a window and feel like the way the wind makes the leaves on a tree dance for you was the world whispering, "You'll be okay."
It'll still be weird. (I don't think that part goes away. Life is fu**in' weird).
But I do think you'll be okay
