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Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

Shelby Forsythia

Top 10 Best Quotes

“Insisting that life stay the same post-loss is essentially the same as saying, “Let’s just pretend this never happened.” That’s an incredible disservice to the person, place, or thing that you lost. Did you love what you lost? If you didn’t love it, was it important, significant, influential, or a large chunk of your life? Did you have hopes, dreams, or expectations attached to it? Then it’s worth grieving its loss. And that loss will change your identity on some level.”

“You cannot fix, change, or remove another person’s grief. You cannot “spare” someone the pain of grieving a loss. Your grief belongs to you; their grief belongs to them.”

“You are allowed to live and feel the experience of grief. By giving yourself permission to experience grief emotions and letting grief move through you, you are allowing grief (and by extension, yourself) to show up how it wants to, not how society wishes it would. There is immense self-love in that. In allowing yourself permission to feel, you are allowing your- self to show up as a whole human being, not just the parts of a human that you (or society) consider to be “appropriate,” “pretty,” or “worthy.”

“The solution to grief is not a pain-free existence. It is allowing ourselves to grieve and witnessing ourselves in that process. Permission and presence are the remedies for agony and isolation.”

“Sitting next to grief and allowing it to root through your former life while slowly unfurling into your new life requires the kind of patience, gentleness, and self-love that many of us have never had to summon before. Remember that at its core, permission is about telling the truth about where you are right now. And sometimes that truth means saying, “I don’t know.”

“Once grief enters your life, it remains a part of your life whether you acknowledge it or not.”

“In grief and loss, it becomes incredibly hard to recognize who we are. Grief makes us different people. Everything that we identify with—from our emotional states to our patterns to our dreams to our fears to our preferences to our core truths— everything fractures and shatters under the weight of loss.”

“If you’re grieving, you have become—at least partially—someone you don’t recognize.”

“Grief ripples out and sends powerful tremors through our foundation, through our hobbies, through our loved ones, and through our minds. For the first time in our lives, we can- not compartmentalize the hard, the bad, or the sad. There’s nowhere to tuck it away because every single aspect of our lives is infected with and tainted by grief.”

“Grief looks, feels, and shows up differently to each person. Just like no two losses are alike, no two griefs are alike, either. You cannot know the full depth of another person’s experience and they cannot know the full depth of yours.”

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Book Keywords:

human, grief, permission, loss, bereavement, uncertainty, death, identity, love, mindfulness, self-help, grief-and-loss, life, self-love, presence, grief-support, grieving, unknown

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