29/04/2025
I have had this conversation recently with a family who disagreed with me before their person died but after they died, they changed their mind and said they agreed. They couldn’t see it before, but they do now.
➡️ It is not really the death we are scared of when someone we love is dying, it’s our grief that petrifies us.
Death itself isn’t the enemy. It happens to us all, and it isn’t punishment. It doesn’t happen just because we talk about it. It’s our grief that unsettles us, that stops us from speaking about death, from exploring what it means, from truly understanding it. It’s our anticipatory grief that kicks in and it’s strong.
We often don’t fear death the way we fear loss. The ache of missing someone, the unbearable weight of absence, the uncertainty of how we’ll carry on, that’s the bit that is scary.
That fear of grief keeps us silent about death and dying. It keeps us from asking questions, from preparing, from acknowledging the inevitable.
But here’s the thing: avoiding grief doesn’t make it disappear. It waits. It lingers. It festers. And when death does come, expectedly or otherwise, it crashes in with all the force of the words we never said, the plans we never made, the conversations we never dared to have.
What if, instead, we let ourselves talk about it? Talk about the fact we will die and those we love will die. What if we allow ourselves to feel it now? What if we acknowledged death as part of life, a natural progression for every single one of us? What if we made space for our grief before it overwhelmed us after the fact?
What if we actually learnt about what dying looks like in advance to ease some of the unknown and reduce fear and panic? Because that’s exactly what it does.
I know and see the difference it makes when we give ourselves permission to explore death, we really do support the weight of our grief in so many ways at the same time.
We maybe just don’t or can’t see it yet, but please trust me, it’s true ❤️
