The tender weight of loss

This past year has been a beautiful year for me, filled with new beginnings, creativity, and moments that opened my heart in unexpected and nourishing ways.

And yet, woven into all this growth, there was also loss. Three things are no longer part of my life: a person, a place, and recently, a pet. I don’t attach easily, not in the deep way that lets someone or something settle into the quiet rooms of my heart, but when I do, it happens slowly and fully. It happens with trust and warmth, and once something or someone nestles here, it becomes part of me. I love with all of myself, whether it is a friend, a piece of land, or a little creature who made the world gentler just by being in it.

When something I love disappears from my life, I feel it as if something has been taken from within my own chest. A silence opens, an emptiness that echoes in places I didn’t even know were tender until they were touched by loss. I revisit memories again and again, holding onto details, conversations, small gestures, the sweetness of ordinary moments. I cry, I wonder if I could have done something differently. I question my role in the loss. I try to repair, I search. I write letters I don’t send. I sit with the feeling because it feels honest to let it move through me in its own time.

Sometimes I feel we live in a world that expects us to move through loss quickly, to fill the empty space with something new, or to close it tightly and lock the door. I understand why: grief is uncomfortable. It disrupts routines, slows us down, softens us in ways that feel risky. Sitting with loss demands presence, and presence asks for vulnerability. It is often easier to bypass it, dilute it, or hide it beneath coping mechanisms or isolation.

But this time, instead of turning inward alone, I chose to share. After my pet went missing, I spoke about it,  I opened up, even though my instinct is usually to keep my grief private. And the amount of love, encouragement, and support that came toward me felt like warm hands placed gently on my back. I felt less alone in my heartbreak, more understood, more held. It reminded me of a scene from Marina Abramović’s performance (details about it here: Reflections on Balkan Erotic Epic — Rosie Tantric ): a grieving woman stood on stage, mourning the loss of her husband, and behind her a big group of women gathered lovingly, grieving with her. They didn’t fix her pain, they witnessed it and they honoured her loss. They also honoured her humanity and the life of her husband.

This memory surfaced in the past days and it reminded me that grief softens when it is held in community, when there are people who simply want to stand quietly (or loudly) beside you and show you they care.

I choose to honour my grief and the the moments that preceded it which were real. The warm hugs and laughter with my friend, the tender conversations we had. The afternoons spent harvesting fruit and roses from my little garden. The joy of petting and playing with my little one. These memories deserve to be kept alive. Accepting their truth sometimes makes the loss feel almost unbearable,  a sharp pain in the chest that releases through tears and sound, flowing like rivers that I don’t know when they will stop. This is what happens when we love: we miss the presence of what once filled our days, we worry about those we can no longer reach, we wonder if they’re safe or happy, and we question whether we cherished those moments as fully as we could.

In a way, we truly realise the depth of our love only when something is gone. Loss reveals the shape of what mattered, it shows us how deeply we were touched.

I don’t have a conclusion or a clear insight. I am still inside this process, still learning to breathe with the feeling of missing my pet, still discovering how to hold tenderness and pain at the same time. I know many people are going through their own losses right now, quietly, bravely, or silently carrying it in their bodies and perhaps it helps to know that whatever way you move through loss is ok and you are not alone.

Love,

Rosie x