you are your own grief expert
You don’t need a damn thing to grieve your baby. You don’t need another book, or a customized stuffed animal, or reiki-blessed mala beads. You don’t need a coach, or a so-called “grief expert,” or anyone telling you how your grief is supposed to go.
You are your own grief expert. No one knows your grief better than you.
There are various offerings within this space: things for comfort and remembrance and honoring (e.g., TeddyGrams and MoxBoxesⓇ); things for validation and support (Compassion Cards + Prints); things for genuine, heartfelt connection (A Touch of Moxy’s Pet Love + Loss Community)—all things for helping you feel seen and understood, and easing your pain as much as possible. That’s what they’re here for; that’s my intention behind them. And I pray they do all of this and more, should you choose to experience them.
But don’t think for one second any of these things (or anything else, for that matter) are required. They didn’t exist when I lost Moxy and endured the hardest parts of grief; they’re simply things I thought, in retrospect, might have made my way a little softer, or opened my heart a little sooner.
All you really need is what you already have: your heart that hurts, and your simple breath. That’s it. Anything beyond that is a bonus, a luxury, a nice-to-have.
“Most of what I know
I’ve learned from falling,
from placing the brighter side
of my hands against the earth
and pressing until vertical. ”
Pause for a moment, and take in the space around you, what’s already here. And if you can, step outside.
Search out the things you’ve been seeing without actually seeing. See the way the light reflects on a single leaf: the bright, white diamond center and its pure black counterpoint underneath, a shadowy twin. Notice the startling symmetry, how the dark makes the light shine brighter, how neither could exist without the other. See the wholeness waiting there.
Look to the stones for rest. Their pace is what your soul calls for now: slow and steady and still.
Feel the soft grasses beneath your feet, a tender cushion at every step. Bring your hands to the earth and run your fingertips along the musty dirt, remembering the wonder you felt as a child, in awe of how so many somethings mysteriously appear from this one thing.
Lift your gaze to the sky above. Breathe in all that space. Ask yourself, at what point does the sky begin? Or end? When does sky stop being sky? What does the sky—all this endless space—not contain? If you let it, the answer will gift you peace.
Nature is a wayshower. Her rhythm is your rhythm; her cycles are your cycles; her intelligence is your intelligence. You are not separate. You are not apart from the rest. You, and your grief, have a place here.
Let the earth hold both of you. Give yourself to the ground until you’re ready, once again, to rise. Find solace within your own soul.
You have everything you need.
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
– Wendell Berry
What is your grief teaching you?
