The Shape of Grief: Learning to Live in the Circle

Grief is not linear—it circles back, softer some days, heavier on others.

The Shape of Grief: Learning to Live in the Circle

Grief changes everything. It stops time, rearranges your heart, and teaches you that love does not end, it simply transforms. In this post, I share my own current experience of grief and explore why grieving is never linear, why it shows up in many forms, and how we can honor it while continuing to live.

The Pause

There will be no horoscopes this week. I feel like I am in a pause.

Grieving the loss of my father is back. Tomorrow I will be picking up his ashes, and it feels like the first day I received the news. It has been eight months, and it feels like it was yesterday. It feels like everything just stopped. I can't move.

All I can think about is how I didn’t get to say goodbye or say the things I wanted to say. You left so suddenly, and all the words are stuck.

Grief Is More Than Loss of Life

When we hear the word “grief,” most people picture funerals and eulogies. But grief wears many faces. It is not only the death of a loved one, but it can also be the loss of a job, the end of a relationship, the closing of a home you loved, the fading of health, or the shattering of dreams.

Grief is the soul’s way of saying: something precious has changed, and I cannot go back to how things were.

It is love, memory, and meaning colliding with absence. And the absence hurts.

Grief Is Not Linear

We often hear about the “five stages of grief,” but grief does not unfold in neat, sequential chapters. It is not a ladder you climb and then step off as “done.”

Grief is circular. You may feel okay one day, only to be undone by a smell, a song, or a season the next. The wave returns, sometimes smaller, sometimes crashing harder than before. You may think, haven’t I already cried this out? The truth: you’re not failing, you’re human.

We are never “done” grieving. But over time, the weight shifts. The sharp edges soften. The circle doesn’t vanish; it becomes a spiral that carries you forward.

Moving Forward While Carrying Grief

Here is the truth many are afraid to say out loud: moving forward does not mean leaving your loved one or your loss behind. It means learning to walk with it in a different way.

Your grief changes shape as you change. At first, it may feel like a boulder strapped to your chest. Later, it becomes a stone in your pocket, always there but lighter to carry.

It is not betrayal to smile, to create, to keep living. Your healing is not disloyalty. In fact, living fully can be one of the most profound ways to honor what you’ve lost.

The Many Forms of Grief

• Death of a Loved One: A soul-shattering loss, where absence feels louder than presence.

• Loss of a Job or Career Path: A grief for identity, routine, purpose, and stability.

• Loss of Home: Displacement cuts deep; it unroots safety, belonging, and memory.

• Loss of Health: Mourning the body’s former strength or freedom.

• Loss of Relationships: Friendships, romantic partnerships, even family bonds, when they break, they take part of us with them.

• Loss of Dreams: Sometimes we grieve the life we imagined but didn’t get to live.

Each of these carries its own weight. All deserve compassion.

What Helps in the Circle

1. Allow the Return: When grief revisits, welcome it. It’s not regression; it’s a reminder of love.

2. Mark the Sacred: Create rituals, anniversaries, daily candles, and journaling that give shape to the circle.

3. Give Grief Companionship: Share your stories. Connection lightens the load.

4. Permission to Live: Laugh. Create. Dream again. This doesn’t erase grief; it allows it to breathe alongside your life.

Grief is not a straight road to “healed.” It is a circle, looping back through memory, loss, and love. And yet, even in its circularity, you move forward, you carry grief, but you also carry resilience, meaning, and transformation.

Your life is not paused forever. It is rewriting itself, one breath at a time.

Reflection: What loss are you carrying right now, and what is one small way you can honor it while still allowing yourself to move forward?

Uninvited Grief

Grief, you arrive uninvited,
yet sit heavy in my chest.
You press pause on my world,
and still, you teach me to rest.

You circle back in waves,
not finished, never done.
But it is softer now,
like dusk instead of noon-day sun.

You carry my father’s voice,
the words I never said.
You keep him alive in silence,
a presence within the dead.

And though you weigh me down,
You also make me see
that love never disappears,
It just reshapes inside of me.