Grief isn’t a tidy arc you move through and graduate from. It’s not a worksheet, a timeline, or a five-step plan you complete and then never look back. For many people—especially those holding intersecting identities, lineages of loss, and ongoing systemic harm—grief is a slow, lifelong, decolonial, ancestral journey of learning to lose and keep loving anyway.
When Grief Refuses the Chart
Kübler-Ross’ “5 stages of grief” model was never meant to be a universal rule, and it certainly wasn’t designed to capture the complexity of collective trauma, racialized grief, or ongoing structural violence. Yet many people are still handed the idea that grief should progress neatly from denial to acceptance, as if feelings that don’t cooperate are somehow doing it wrong. This can leave people wondering, “Why am I still this sad?” or “Why did my anger show up ten years later?”
Grief rarely moves in straight lines. It loops back, flares up, quiets down, and shape-shifts over time. Anniversaries, smells, songs, political events, or a photo uncovered in a drawer can reopen what seemed “finished.” That doesn’t mean you’ve failed to heal. It means love, loss, and memory are still in relationship with each other.
Decolonizing the Story of Grief
Colonial and Western medical models tend to treat grief as an individual symptom to be managed and resolved on schedule—preferably off the clock and out of sight. Many Indigenous, Black, and global majority traditions, by contrast, locate grief in community, land, ceremony, and ongoing connection with their dead. In those frameworks, you don’t “move on” from grief; you move with it, integrating it into how you live, relate, and remember.
Decolonizing grief means asking: Who decided grief should be private, fast, and quiet? Whose comfort is served by insisting on “closure”? It also means reclaiming rituals, practices, and languages of mourning that were suppressed or devalued—song, wailing, altars, mutual aid, storytelling, resistance. Your grief may be about one person, yes, and it may also be about land stolen, communities displaced, identities targeted, and futures foreclosed.
Grief as an Ancestral Relationship
For many people, grief is not only about what was lost in this lifetime; it is interwoven with ancestral trauma and resilience. Studies on intergenerational trauma and epigenetics point to how histories of violence, displacement, and oppression can echo through bodies and nervous systems over generations. Your grief may feel “too big” for the visible loss in front of you because it is carrying older stories that were never fully witnessed.
Ancestral grief work does not mean you are responsible for “fixing” everything that happened before you. It can mean allowing space for feelings that show up without a clear, tidy narrative; honoring your people’s survival; or creating small rituals that acknowledge those who came before you—candles, photos, food offerings, names spoken aloud. Grief, in this sense, becomes a way of staying in conversation with both the dead and the living.
Learning to Lose, Slowly
If grief is lifelong, that doesn’t mean you will feel forever shattered. It means that life keeps inviting you to practice losing in different ways: people, places, identities, futures you imagined, illusions you once needed to survive. Each loss asks new questions of your heart and body. Some seasons of grief are sharp and overwhelming; others are a dull ache in the background; some arrive as unexpected tenderness, gratitude, or even humor at the absurdity of being a human who loves things that don’t last.
Learning to lose is learning to let reality be what it is without abandoning yourself. It might look like:
Letting tears come when they come, instead of apologizing for them.
Noticing where grief lives in your body and offering it gentleness instead of critique.
Allowing joyful experiences without feeling you’ve betrayed the one you lost.
You don’t pass or fail this learning. You just keep meeting yourself, again and again, as you are.
How Soma Roots Therapy Holds Grief
At Soma Roots Therapy, grief is treated as a sacred, relational process—not a problem to “get over” on a deadline. Sessions might include: gently tracking how grief shows up in your body; naming not only personal but collective and ancestral layers; and honoring the ways your identities, culture, and spiritual or non-spiritual frameworks shape how you mourn. The work moves at the pace of your nervous system, not a cultural productivity schedule.
Grief here is allowed to be angry, numb, relieved, disoriented, repetitive, or wordless. You don’t have to justify why you’re still not “back to normal” when normal itself may have been built on silencing your pain. Instead, the question becomes: What kind of support, ritual, and community do you need to carry this loss over time, without carrying it alone?
You are not failing at grief because it hasn’t ended. You’re living inside a love that is learning, slowly and bravely, how to exist in a world where loss is real—and so is connection.
