The Season of Grief: On Loss, Love, and Moving Forward

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I'll be honest with you. This time of year is a strange one for me.

I love fall — the light, the air, the particular quality of October afternoons. And yet, September arrives each year carrying something heavy alongside it. In 2018, I lost both of my parents. My mother died in July. My father broke his hip five days after her funeral and never fully recovered, physically or mentally. The months from September through November of that year were some of the hardest of my life. I think that sticks. The body remembers, even when the mind tries to move on.

There's also the approaching holiday season, which carries its own complicated weight — particularly for divorced parents, even those lucky enough, as I am, to have a truly wonderful co-parent in my ex-husband Dave. And if I'm being completely honest, there's a quieter grief too: the end of summer, the closing of the pool, the loss of weekend afternoons reading and laughing with girlfriends in the sun. That counts as grief too, even if it sounds small.

Which brings me to what I really want to talk about this month.

Grief Has More Than One Definition

Most of us think of grief as something that follows death. And it does. But grief is also what we feel at the end of a marriage, the loss of a friendship, a health diagnosis that changes everything, a child leaving home, a version of ourselves we can no longer return to. Some losses break your heart even when nobody has died.

There's a beautiful resource from Social Workers Toolbox that captures this so well — a visual that names the kinds of losses we don't always have language for: the childhood you never had, the future you imagined, the relationship you fought for, the home you once knew, life before everything changed. If any of those resonate with you, I encourage you to visit socialworkerstoolbox.com — their free resources are genuinely worth exploring.

As a therapist, I've sat with grief in many forms over many years. And here is the one thing I know with absolute certainty: grief is the one thing a client and I will never be able to fix. We can tend to it. We can make space for it. We can help it become something that doesn't swallow you whole. But we don't fix it, and we shouldn't try.

We Don't Move On — We Move Forward

One of the most important things I've ever encountered on this subject is a TED Talk by Nora McInerny, titled "We Don't Move On From Grief, We Move Forward With It." If you haven't seen it, please do. McInerny lost her father, her husband, and a pregnancy in the span of a single year, and she speaks about grief with a honesty and even humor that is rare and remarkable. Her central insight — that we don't leave our grief behind, we carry it with us as we grow — is one of the truest things I know. You can watch it here, and I promise it is worth every minute.

Moving forward with grief rather than past it changes everything about how we relate to loss. It means we don't have to pretend we're over something we're not. It means the love doesn't have to end just because the person did. It means grief and joy can coexist — not perfectly, not without pain, but genuinely.

The Biggest Thing I Learned

The greatest lesson my 2018 season of loss taught me is this: the love remains. I feel it from my parents every single day. In the things they taught me, in the ways I show up for my own children, in the moments when I catch myself saying something exactly the way my Dad would have said it. They are gone, and they are still here. Both things are true.

If you are carrying grief right now — fresh or old, large or quiet, the kind the world recognizes or the kind that doesn't have a name yet — I hope you'll give yourself permission to feel it without rushing through it. And I hope you'll know that the love at the center of it is not lost. It doesn't go anywhere. It just changes shape.

You Don't Have to Carry It Alone

If grief — in any of its forms — is weighing on you, please know that support is available. At Shore Neurocognitive and Behavioral Health, we provide psychotherapy and psychiatric medication management for adults age 20 and older, including support for grief, loss, anxiety, depression, and the complicated emotions that come with major life transitions. We are here, and we would be honored to walk alongside you. Visit us at snhealth.net or call 443-746-3698.

Maggie Black, PsyD, Licensed Psychologist & Owner, SNBH

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