Grief in Layers
Date: December 21, 2025
Portal: Winter Solstice
Cycle: Week 35
Record of the Turning
This week arrived heavy, unannounced, and uncompromising.
The news of Patty’s health—cancer possibly returning—fell like sudden winter gravity. Grief did not come alone. It carried implications, futures, fears, and the quiet terror of imagining a world without someone woven deeply into love, family, and shared creation. The weight was too much to hold all at once, and for several days, it pressed down on everything.
As often happens, new grief unlocked older rooms.
A single image of Joey opened a doorway to decades-old sorrow: pregnancy inside danger, love without safety, endurance learned too early. From there, other threads surfaced—Z, my mother, long-held grief that had already been lived through, yet not fully released. The grief did not argue. It rose in layers, one calling to the next.
Joy was absent this week. There was only movement and distraction. And that was enough—for a time.
Today, on the Winter Solstice, the tide shifted.
I slowed. I stopped trying to plan, fix, prepare, or brace. I let the grief be what it was without asking it to become useful. I went into the sunlight, stood beneath Myrna, watched the sky change, moved my body, bathed in warmth. In that stillness, something lifted—not resolved, not erased, but softened.
Truth Remembered
Grief is not a problem to solve.
It is a process to feel.
Grief moves in spirals, not lines.
When old grief returns, it is not failure—it is completion.
This week taught me that presence is the medicine.
That comfort matters.
That I can hold myself through sorrow without abandoning myself or racing toward the future.
Integration
I am learning to let grief pass through without assigning it tasks.
To trust the spiral.
To honor the dark without fearing it.
On the longest night of the year, I did not rush the light.
And because of that, it returned—quietly, honestly, in its own time.
Symbols
Spiral · Hearth Flame · Winter Sun · Myrna · Water · Stillness