Everything Feels Heavy Right Now.

Everything Feels Heavy Right Now.

Here's What Your Grief Is Asking For.

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A month ago, a cat named Kiki died, and I have been carrying that loss ever since.

​Kiki was abandoned years ago in the townhouse complex where I used to live, left behind by someone who had also hurt her. My neighbor and I decided that wasn't going to be the end of her story. We both fed her every day, played with her, and made sure she was safe. My neighbor took her indoors, because I'm allergic and never could. But Kiki greeted me every single morning when I left for work and every evening when I came home. When I moved away, I visited her from time to time.

Kiki

Tiger's eye urn pendant, in the same golds and blacks she wore.

​In her last weeks she was diagnosed with an abdominal tumor, and her health declined fast. Our friends pooled money so she could be released from her pain with dignity and cremated. This past weekend, my neighbor surprised me with an urn pendant: a tiger's eye crystal on the front, Kiki's name on the back, and her ashes held inside.

​Here's the part I want you to notice: for a month, some voice in me kept whispering that I didn't have the right to grieve as if she were my cat. She lived somewhere else with someone else.

That voice is what I call the Created Self, the version of you assembled from other people's expectations about how you should feel and for how long. And it has been very loud lately.

Because there is a lot to carry.
In eleven days this month, we lost Hayden Panettiere at 36, Michael Wright at 70, Dolly Parton at 80, Tim Curry at 80, and Peter Cullen at 85. Those names land especially hard on Gen X and millennials, because these weren't distant figures. They were the voices and faces stitched into our childhoods and our growing up: Optimus Prime and Eeyore, Pennywise and Frank-N-Furter, Eddie King Jr., the girl from Heroes and Bring It On, and Dolly, who felt like everyone's aunt. When five of them go in under two weeks, it isn't only that people died. It's that a whole era suddenly feels finished.

And that's only a portion of what these weeks have held.

On August 26, a glacier collapse triggered catastrophic flooding across the Nepal–Tibet border. Hundreds are confirmed dead. Thousands are still missing. Entire settlements are simply gone. Most of us will never meet a single person affected. Still we feel it — a low, un-nameable dread about a world that seems less stable than it used to be.

Then there's something quieter that people rarely call grief at all.
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We've had recall after recall — lettuce, produce, and other staples that used to be unremarkable. Then on August 21, an announcement opened the door to 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef entering, without naming which countries it's coming from. People are avoiding foods they used to love, researching food before dinner, and feeding their families with a knot in their stomach.

That is grief. It just doesn't look like a funeral.

You are mourning the loss of ordinary trust — the ability to buy food, cook it, and enjoy it without vigilance. You are grieving a version of daily life that felt safe, and a version of your community you believed was possible.


Your grief matters. All of it.
In Abundantly You: A Toolkit for Authentic Self-Care, Section 4 (Your Trauma) devotes three articles to exactly this territory:

• "Honoring Conflicting Emotions in Grief" — because you can feel devastated and relieved at the same time. Sad to have lost a loved one and glad that they are no longer suffering. Those don't cancel each other out. They're proof the loss was complicated and real.
• "Your Grief Matters" — because grief doesn't require a perfect relationship, or a close one, or any relationship at all. You can grieve a public figure you never met. You can grieve a pet who technically belonged to someone else. You can grieve a dream, a future, or a sense of safety that quietly died while you were still living.
• "Being Present While Grieving" — because that exhausting swing between replaying the past and dreading the future isn't you failing at grief. That swinging back and forth is grief.

​You'll find these articles on pages 89 through 94.
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And if you're ready to actually work through it.
The Abundantly You Companion Guide: A 52-Week Journal for Authentic Self-Care gives you a full week dedicated to this. Week 25, "Grieving What You've Lost," asks you to name what you're carrying — including the grief you haven't given yourself permission to feel — to sit with emotions that contradict each other without picking one, and to notice what your Created Self has been telling you about how fast you should be over it.

Week 25 of the Companion Guide: teaching, reflection prompts, and space to write.

Then it asks something gentler: when the next wave of grief arrives, let it be there. Don't fix it, rush it, or push it away. Just notice what support you need.

Every wave of grief you survive becomes evidence that you can survive the next one.

Start here, today
You don't need the book to begin. Try this: name one loss you've been minimizing. Say it plainly, without the word "just." Not "it was just a cat." Not "I didn't even know them." Not "other people have it worse."

Then let it be true.

I'm wearing Kiki around my neck as I write this. She was abandoned and abused and she still chose to love two people who fed her. My grief for her is not disproportionate. It's accurate.

Your grief is too.

​Abundantly You and the Abundantly You Companion Guide are available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and most online retailers.

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