Ten Years On: Grief, Aliveness, and the Sacred Exchange

Ten years have passed since my mother died of cancer, and still the word passed feels misleading, as though something moved cleanly from one place to another. What actually happened was more ambiguous, more enduring. She left this mortal coil, yes, but she also stayed, folded into memory, sensation, seasons, and the inner architecture of who I have become.

Grief does not obey the rules we hope it might, it does not complete itself, nor does it ask permission before it returns. It settles into us, becoming less sharp perhaps, but no less real, an ache that drifts between background and foreground, sometimes barely perceptible, sometimes insistent and intimate, and then, almost without warning, a decade has passed.

There is so much noise in the world now; tension, urgency, outrage, the constant pull to react, to take a position, to stay alert to everything all at once. I often find myself wondering what my mother would make of it all. I doubt she would be impressed by the lack of care, the casualness with which people turn away from one another, the way kindness so often feels like an afterthought. Yet I can also hear her response, she would focus on her own world — not in denial, but in devotion to what was immediate and real. She understood that attention is a form of choice, that we are shaped by what we repeatedly turn toward. There was wisdom in her capacity to tend to the small, the relational, the human, especially when the wider world felt overwhelming.

Grief has taught me something similar, it narrows life down to essentials. It makes abstraction intolerable. When someone you love dies, particularly after an illness that unfolds over time, you are stripped of the fantasy that life is stable or fair or predictable. What remains is breath, presence, love, loss, and the slow, relentless movement of time.

Francis Weller writes, “There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive.”

I have come to understand this not as poetic sentiment, but as lived truth. Grief has not made my life smaller, if anything, it has made it more vivid. It has required me to stay awake to experience, even when doing so has hurt. In this sacred exchange, loss and life are inseparable; we cannot know one without the other.

As is the rhythm of grief, there are days when my mother feels close, almost companionable, and days when she recedes so far into the background that I forget, momentarily, that absence is part of the fabric of my life. Then there are moments, unexpected, uninvited, when the ache returns with surprising force. Grief is not linear; it does not move obediently forward. It circles, loops, revisits, and waits patiently for the right conditions to make itself known. In this way, it resembles love more than loss, and the sacred exchange Weller describes becomes visible: the unbearable ache of absence offers a deeper awareness of presence, a sharpening of what it means to be alive.

I feel her absence most acutely at Christmas, or perhaps in the long prelude to it. She loved the sparkle and the fantasy, the ritual and the excess, the permission to escape into something luminous. Celebration, for her, was not frivolous, it was necessary. A way of holding light and dark together without apology. Her love of these moments’ lives on now as longing, a tenderness that arrives each year alongside the season. Grief attaches itself to time like this, to places and smells and traditions, to moments that once held someone whole. It reminds us not only of who we have lost, but of how deeply we have loved, and in that love, we encounter the sacred exchange: the intertwining of what is unbearable with what is exquisitely alive.

What ten years has taught me is that grief does not diminish us, it deepens us. We do not grow beyond our pain; we grow with it. Our development as human beings is not marked by the absence of suffering, but by our capacity to remain present to it without being undone.

Loss initiates us into a more honest relationship with life and teaches us that love and vulnerability are inseparable, that to care deeply is to accept the risk of heartbreak. Yet it is precisely this risk that gives life its texture and intensity. Grief sharpens our awareness of impermanence, and in doing so, heightens our appreciation for what is fleeting, fragile, and real.

This understanding quietly informs how I meet others in my work as a therapist. Grief has dismantled any lingering belief I might have had that pain is something to be solved or overcome. Instead, it has taught me about accompaniment, about staying, about listening, about resisting the urge to tidy away what is messy or unresolved. When someone brings their sorrow into the room, I do not experience it as unfamiliar terrain. I know it’s rhythms. I know how it can coexist with joy, how it can sit alongside meaning and purpose, how it can ask to be acknowledged rather than fixed. Grief has taught me to trust the intelligence of suffering, and to honour the ways people learn to live alongside what they cannot change. In this holding, I witness again the sacred exchange: the unbearable ache of grief becomes the doorway to presence, to care, and to attunement.

Today, when I think of my mother, I imagine her sitting on the cliff edge at Whitby, breathing in the salt air, watching the sea in constant motion. There is something about the sea that feels like grief to me — vast, restless, capable of great calm and great force within the same body. It does not resolve itself, it moves, it reshapes the shoreline slowly, persistently, over time. Perhaps grief does the same to us, perhaps it alters us gradually, carving depth where once there was certainty, softness where once there was defence. Perhaps, in this enduring presence, we discover the sacred exchange that Weller names: the interweaving of pain and life, of loss and aliveness, of what breaks us and what makes us whole.

Ten years on, grief no longer dominates my days, but it remains a faithful companion. It keeps me close to what matters. It reminds me of the cost and the privilege of loving. It anchors me in a particular kind of aliveness, one that feels tender, sober, and quietly fierce. There is indeed a sacred exchange at work here, between ache and vitality, between absence and presence, between what feels unbearable and what makes life luminous, and perhaps the task is not to escape this exchange, but to live it — attentively, compassionately, and with as much openness as we can manage, allowing grief to deepen our engagement with the world rather than shrink it.