“Each time someone dies, a library burns. I’m watching it burn right to the ground.”

When relationships are complicated, the grief that follows can also be complicated. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you are grieving someone with whom you had a difficult relationship.

The language of sabbatical can be highly useful in grief. How might it feel to shift your language from, “I can’t do this right now” to “I’m on sabbatical from ___ while I tend to my own healing?”

When you’re in a space where the pain of your loss feels all-consuming, here are a few strategies for getting yourself through.

In order to begin healing the pain of our losses, first we have to let ourselves sit with that pain. Noticing what’s underneath our resistance to sadness is the first step in allowing ourselves to feel it.

One of the many challenges of dying, grief, and loss is that it takes us into a place beyond language. Words become inadequate to describe our experience. Music, I find, often becomes a portal to that place that words cannot reach.

We’re often told that time heals all wounds, but when it comes to grief, that isn’t enough.

Understanding what is happening in your brain can help you understand some of your grief responses.

We tend to talk a lot about the big shifts in our lives that grief creates: the holidays without our loved ones, the missed milestones and celebrations, the future partners and kids that our people will never meet. But grief lives in the small spaces too, and sometimes those are the ones that can take us most by surprise.

New years don’t always mean new beginnings. Sometimes they are painful reminders of endings. Sometimes while the world is looking forward, we’re living in a separate space where time stands still, becomes muddled, or disappears altogether.