Grieving Love

Love, loss, and the changing landscape of Women’s Personal Ecology™

How fortunate I feel to have known a love that felt true. And how impossible it can seem, after the physical form of someone dies, to comprehend what has happened to that love.

When I lost the person I loved, disbelief came first. How could I lose love if love was real? If it still lives in me, why do I grieve?

I have begun to understand that I could never lose the love. I lost the form in which it met me fully. I lost the face I could turn toward in any states of mind or heart, the voice that called my name as love, the presence that made my own love so easy to express.

This understanding does not soften every moment. His physical presence mattered. Our ordinary life together mattered. Some days, the absence still feels impossible.

Yet love has not vanished. It moves through my memories, my decisions, and the quiet moments I never thought I would have to live without him. What I grieve, in part, is all the love I can no longer give in the way I shared with him. The person who received it so naturally is no longer here. The void is always going to be there, yet this love finds its way through the cracks of my heart.

I am learning how to live with both its presence and his absence.

When loss changes the world around us

Judith Butler writes, “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.”

I understand those words differently now. To love him was to let our lives become part of each other’s. His death could not leave me as I was before. Grief reveals how deeply our lives, memories, emotions & dreams were woven together.

This is also where my experience meets the lens of Women’s Personal Ecology™: an understanding of a woman’s life through the relationships, bodily rhythms, responsibilities, places, and conditions that shape and sustain her.

We live within a web of care. We become ourselves through familiar voices, shared routines, the work we carry, the places where we belong, and the people beside whom we can rest.

When the physical form of someone central to that web dies, the change reaches into ordinary life. A familiar hour feels different. A decision once shared becomes ours to make alone. The future we imagined no longer has the same meaning.

For me, grief has changed how I hold time, ambition, leadership, and responsibility. Some days, I can hold a vision for the future. Some days, I need to move more slowly and attend to the lifeforce immediately within me.

I had to ask what can sustain me within this changed landscape.

Making room for care

Love finds expression in my writing, my work, and what I continue to build. Creation sometimes gives language to what would otherwise remain quiet within me.

There are also days when nothing wants to become words. Days when I need rest, when a task must wait, when silence is all, I can offer.

I want to leave room for those days. Even as I try to discover meaning, I need my own permission to live through moments that offer no insights at all.

Within my personal ecology, receiving care matters as much as giving it. I am learning to notice how mother nature nurtures me through this time, where I need privacy from rest of the world- for my mourning and yet becoming one with both pain & love.

Having a few close girlfriends' support has been the key to my sanity in many days- friendships has become more selective now, clearer and more aligned with my becoming through this journey. A phone call, a silly topic to laugh, a cup of coffee, a silent walk in the part to a playdate for my kiddo are the avenues where I am finding solace.

Moreover, caring for myself- has become shades of love, giving space for my heart, mind and spirit to mourn and heal in spirals.

The expectations we carry

For a woman already accustomed to caring for others, grief can arrive within a life whose responsibilities continue.

Children need care. Work asks for decisions. Everyday life keeps moving. Alongside these demands, there may be expectations about how sorrow should look: how long it should last, how quietly it should be carried, how soon we should appear capable again.

I am becoming more attentive to the space between what is asked of me and what I can offer. +There are layers of additional negative projections & pressures from social scripts that comes to a widow which I will talk to you about in another journal- as that will need an entire section of its own :)

Through WPE, I want to make room for that question too. A woman’s capacity is shaped by the conditions around her: if any true help becomes available, the responsibilities she carries, the freedom she has to recover, and whether her feelings can be received without judgments, can an entire culture make room for her grief without dogmas?

I can ask myself to be gentle. I can also ask for circumstances that make gentleness possible. At times - isolating myself becomes only choice rather than being surrounded by twisted social norms.

This is part of what I mean by tending a personal ecology: noticing where care flows, where it is missing, and what needs to change so that life can be sustained. Grief's another gift is Intuition, Sensitivity, Groundedness… we will talk about these later fully as well. For now- know that Grief of a Woman is not weakness at all. It can paint an entire new canvas of her personal ecology.

Protecting tenderness

Grief has made me more attentive to what feels honest and what asks me to diminish myself.

I am learning that I can set a boundary while keeping my heart open. I can choose whom I trust with my sorrow. I can step away from a conversation that leaves me feeling smaller. I can leave some questions unanswered.

These boundaries help shelter the tenderness I am carrying.

Some days, I feel steady. Other days, I come undone. Memories enter the room unexpectedly. His face appears in my mind. A story returns. Tears come, then silence.

I am trying to meet these moments without turning each one into a measure of how well I am healing.

The love I knew remains part of me, even as my relationship with its absence changes.

Love within the life before me

Megan Devine reminds us, “Grief lasts as long as love lasts.”

I hear in those words permission to stop asking when my grief will end. I can allow it to change as I change. I can miss him and still experience a moment of joy. I can care about the future while longing for the life we shared.

I can let love move into words, care, and creation. I can also let it remain quietly within me, without asking it to become anything.

The life before me is still taking shape. I am learning its rhythms, noticing its needs, and discovering where support can take root. What I build will carry something of the love I have known, alongside the sorrow of his absence.

So, I let the tears come. I let the howl become a voice, and the voice become quiet again.

I am grieving because I loved. I am still loving as I grieve.

And sometimes, love feels like the full moon behind dark clouds, present through the long night, its light visible again when the clouds move.

A gentle invitation to reflect

If these words meet you in a season of loss, take only the questions that feel useful. You can leave the rest for another day.

• What has changed in the daily ecology of my life?

• Where do I need care, companionship, or relief from an expectation?

• What would help me make room for both love and absence today?

You may have an answer. You may have only a feeling, a silence, or the name of someone you could ask to sit beside you.

Begin there.

With love,
Salana

Scholar’s Note

Judith Butler’s Precarious Life illuminates how deeply our relationships shape who we are—and why loss can unsettle our sense of self. Megan Devine’s reminder that “grief lasts as long as love lasts” offers permission to live without a prescribed timeline for sorrow. Together, these perspectives resonate with Women’s Personal Ecology™: grief unfolds within a changing web of relationships, responsibilities, and care.

Words accompanying this reflection: Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, p. 23; Megan Devine, “Is their grief normal?”, Refuge in Grief.