Grief as a Companion

It is an umbrella term we use to cover for all sorts of things most people would rather not name and have no idea how to fix.
Plenty of people like to be alone. But solitude and seclusion are different from loneliness. Loneliness is a state of profound distress.

But whenever I talk about the stages of grief, I have to remind people that the stages aren’t linear and may not happen in this order. It’s not a map but it provides some scaffolding for this unknown world. There’s denial, which we say a lot of early on: This virus won’t affect us . Ther...

• It’s behavior suppressing powers usually disappears when the threat of punishment is removed.
• It often triggers a fight-or-flight response and renders us aggressive if escape is not an option.
• It inhibits the ability to learn new and better responses, oft...