DIARY OF A SLEEPLESS EMPATH: GRIEF THAT WAKES ME - 3 part series When Grief Isn’t Just Loss - Is It Legacy?
This reflection is part of a larger journey exploring the meaning of life through the lens of emotional divergence, spiritual grief, and the power of intuitive insight.
Across this 3 part series, I explore loss, legacy, purpose, and the unseen layers of what it means to be deeply human - and deeply awake.
When Grief Isn’t Just Loss - Is It Legacy?
What do we do with the grief we weren’t taught how to hold?
This question has formed like a whisper in the dark, louder than any sob. Sharp, slow, and steady. In the weeks following two significant losses, I found myself returning to the same 3:47am stillness. But it wasn't silence. It was a mind-storm.
A friend had passed - someone whose soul radiated goodness, despite us not being especially close. The purity of his essence touched me in ways I still can’t articulate. Only four months from diagnosis to a sudden departure.
RIP Bud. I guess there is more need for you to be on the other side.
Ten days earlier, my mother has also died. We weren’t close. And yet, it had already cracked something deeper. A wound I thought had healed - well, perhaps the surface had - but something else was waiting beneath it. An empty space I hadn’t even realised was there before, but one that grief insisted I finally open.
I wasn’t grieving the mother I lost. I was grieving the mother I never had.
The relationship that never existed. The conversations we never shared. The unconditional pride I never got to receive.
My grief wasn’t about what had ended - it was about what never began. That kind of grief seemed hollow, and ancient.
A childhood so far beyond lost, it felt invisible - not just missing, as it had never truly been offered.
Weeks earlier, I’d spoken publicly about not having a family - whilst not factually accurate, it was emotionally, entirely true. Then suddenly, I was forced to confront that specific truth, except this time through the finality of death.
And the grief that emerged?
Was like a galloping herd, chasing me full pelt into an unseen boggy marsh.
Trapped. Thick. Heavy. Sapping the motivation from my muscles and the joy from my breath.
When the Grief Isn’t About Death
I began to wonder and search for answers to profound questions that seemed like never ending, nautilus spirals:
- If our souls choose our parents, what was the absence of them, here to give me?
- And, is grief, the shadow side of love, or the evidence of it?
Grief is a tide - sometimes still, sometimes pulling us under without warning. So I stopped trying to comprehend the waves. I saw them as a chance to reflect; on whether something else mattered.
Because something else longed to live and wanted to emerge.
I have never been somebody to ignore or outrun heart ache. Instead, I let this new version show me what I need to remember.
Mourning the Absence of What Never Was
It wasn't not just about mourning death, which in fact, was just the prompt.
It was about mourning a version of myself who was never allowed to exist. The girl who didn’t get mothered. The teenager who didn’t have a safe place to land. The woman who rose without roots.
No one teaches us how to hold grief like this.
So I did what I could: I stayed awake with it. I pondered it. I let it have space in my system to expand. I gave time to bring meaning which were in of themselves meaningless. Then I discovered giving it words. Not because they’re perfect or had the answers, but because the silence of hours were made available.
And still...
My emotions were churning round and round like a friggin tornado.
My usual tools - connecting with others, meditating, serving - felt like trying to sweep up a tsunami with a dustpan.
I didn’t want to be productive. I wanted to be present. And not in a performative way - not to teach or coach through it - just to witness myself.
To finally let the space I give others, be something I also deserved.
To make sense of my own meaning of life.
Ironically it needed some sort of weird, miss-informed logic.
It was only through writing that the convoluted inter-connectedness of it all started to unravel.
Where I Sit Now
Even healers, need to time to work though their stuff.
I’ve made a life of holding space for others. But in those nights, I didn’t need insight. I didn’t need strategy. I needed grace for myself.
It’s still early. The questions still burn. The ache still occasionally visits. But I’m not disrupted by the confusion anymore.
The now significantly lessened grief, has become another part of my tool-belt, most certainly not a set back, but a feature of a life deeply felt and expressed.
A reminder that I haven’t just survived. I’ve lived.
And if all this feeling, is the only part of me that remains as my legacy, then maybe, just maybe, it’s enough.
Before this grief, I thought I had found resilience. But now I know - tenacity without reflection isn’t complete. And clarity without emotion isn’t truth.
If this is what grief taught me… I can’t wait to show you what my purpose as an empath revealed.