Grief Gives You A Permission Slip To Live

Plus, your next book to read 📚

Apr 23, 2025

Anyone who knows grief personally will tell you it’s more than sadness. Over the last 22 years, I’ve found that it’s my greatest permission slip for life. At 32, I know I haven’t always exercised that permission slip, but that’s also a part of my grief journey. Like a beating heart, your world contracts and expands after the loss of a loved one. You make new friends, and you lose old ones. You find new hobbies only to realize your old ones never bring you joy anymore. So on and so on.

During that contracting and expanding, it’s easy to get stuck in the seasons when your life feels the smallest because the safety it comes with feels alluring. It gives you the one thing that you want the most after facing death — less to worry about. But, for as lovely as it is to narrow in on the people who love you or the hobbies you actually enjoy, a full life is on the other side of being brave enough to fill it with more new.

I don’t think you have to be reckless in your attempt to live and fill your life, but you do have to be brave. I’ve had to practice trusting that the good in my life will remain even if I try out a new friendship or pursue a different path when neither feels like a sure thing. The vulnerability of putting myself out there often feels adjacent, like distant fourth cousins, to how lost I felt when I was in the beginning of grieving my mom. I remember feeling exposed and tender; it was like I was in the thick of stretching my skin to fit into this new reality into a different version of myself, and I had to experience it all physically and mentally in real time. The process makes it harder to invite new experiences into my life that have the potential to shapeshift me, not always because I’m scared of the results but because the process itself can feel uncomfortable.

But then I think about that permission slip. I think about how my mom’s death gave me the permission to feel in ways I never had before. I think about how my grandma’s death a decade later gave me the foundation for my advocacy and writing career. Grief was the largest input in my young life that sparked unrivaled momentum, but it hasn’t been the only input in my life for years.

Acting like grief gave me the permission slip, but I give myself the chance is how I’ve most enjoyed building my life.

I wrote this Substack early last week before I came across Promise Me Sunshine by Cara Bastone. But the Universe works in interesting ways. The book is the perfect pairing for today’s Substack. The novel is Lenny’s story as she works through a “learn to live” list following her best friend’s death. She becomes close with Miles, who turns into her volunteer grief guru. It is an easy read, in that I read it over the weekend, but wow, did I cry. It’s a novel that *gets* grief and love.