When
Life Changes
After Loss
GRIEF & LOSS
THOUGHTS ON GRIEF, LOSS,
AND CONTINUING
THE BOND
FROM KIM RUSSO
_edited.png)
Grief is the price of love. It is the ache of connection,
the evidence that what you shared is real and it mattered
_edited.png){kind=small}
When You're Grieving
Learning to Live Without Leaving Them Behind
I
am not a grief expert or therapist, and I would never pretend to be. I have experienced grief in my own life, just as so many of you have, and I have also spent decades sitting with grieving people through my work as a psychic medium. What I am sharing here comes from my own experiences with loss and from what the Spirit world has shown and taught me again and again.
One of the things nobody really prepares you for after losing someone you love is the guilt that can come when life starts asking you to participate again. Someone invites you to a birthday party. There is a wedding. A new baby comes into the family. Your child graduates. The holidays come around again. Maybe everyone is laughing around the dinner table and, for just a moment, you find yourself laughing too.
And then it hits you.
How can I be having fun when they aren’t here to have fun? How can we celebrate without them? They should be here.
I understand that feeling. Sometimes grief convinces us that enjoying life again means we are somehow leaving our loved one behind. We can even begin to measure our love by our sadness, as though feeling happy, traveling, celebrating or simply having a good day means we are forgetting what they no longer physically have.
Looking at Guilt Differently
The guilt is not coming from a lack of love. It is coming from love itself.
You wanted them at that wedding. You wanted them sitting at that birthday table. You wanted them in the family picture. You wanted them to meet the new baby, see the graduation, celebrate the anniversary and be there for all those ordinary days in between. Of course you did. But their physical absence does not mean that you have to become absent from your own life.
The Permission To Keep Living
One of the messages I have heard consistently from loved ones in Spirit throughout my years of doing readings is very simple: Please keep living!
I have watched people come into readings carrying tremendous guilt because part of them feels they need their loved one’s permission to be happy again. What I have witnessed repeatedly is that their loved ones give them exactly that.
I want to be very clear about something. This is not me giving you permission. I don’t get to tell anyone how long to grieve, when to laugh again or when they should be ready to move forward. I am sharing something I have watched loved ones in Spirit communicate to the people they love over and over again.
They Don't Want You to Prove Your Love by Suffering
And there is a reason for that.
From everything I have experienced in my work, they are not sitting in the Spirit world feeling deprived because we are still here having birthdays, taking vacations, falling in love, welcoming babies and experiencing the physical life they no longer have.
We naturally imagine their experience from our perspective because we are the ones experiencing their physical absence. Their chair is empty to us. Their voice is missing from the room. We cannot reach across the table and touch them. So naturally, we imagine that they must feel that same separation from us. What Spirit has taught me is that their experience is very different.
Where They Really Are
One of the things I have heard repeatedly through my work is that the Spirit world feels incredibly familiar to them. Rather than describing themselves as being somewhere foreign or frightening, loved ones often communicate an extraordinary sense of recognition, peace and connection. Many describe it as feeling as though they have returned to something they already knew.
In other words, we may feel that they have left home. They often communicate that they have returned home. We are imagining them missing the birthday, the wedding or the vacation through our human eyes. We picture them somewhere thinking, I wish I could be doing that too. But that is not how they have communicated their experience to me.
What I have witnessed is awareness. They know what is happening in our lives. They acknowledge the milestones. They recognize the people we love and the lives that continue to unfold here. And rather than asking us to stop because they are no longer physically participating, they encourage us to experience the life that is still ours.
That doesn’t mean you won’t ache for them at your daughter’s wedding. It doesn’t mean you won’t look at an empty chair and think, You should be sitting there. It doesn’t mean you won’t hold a new grandchild and feel tremendous joy and tremendous sadness in the very same moment.
That is grief. Love is still present, but the person you want to physically share that love with is not.
What I don’t want you to do is mistake a moment of happiness for a moment of forgetting.
You did not forget them because you laughed. You did not leave them behind because you took the trip. You did not love them less because you celebrated a birthday. And you do not have to remain unhappy to prove how deeply you loved them.
The love was real before they died. It is real while you grieve. And it remains real when you begin experiencing joy again. So when happiness eventually finds its way back into your life, even in small pieces, you don’t have to apologize for it. Go to the wedding. Celebrate the birthday. Hold the baby. Take the trip. Laugh when something is funny. And if, right in the middle of that beautiful moment, you suddenly find yourself crying because you would give anything for them to be physically standing beside you, let yourself have that moment too.
Joy does not cancel grief, and grief does not cancel joy. There is room for both.
After all these years of doing this work, there is one message I would never want someone who is grieving to miss: Your loved one already knows how much you miss them. You do not have to sacrifice your happiness to prove how much you love them.
Your loved ones who have gone home are in their natural state. They often remind us that they are where we all come from and, from the perspective of eternity, this lifetime is only a small part of a much greater existence. We come here to experience what it means to be human, to form relationships, to face challenges, to grow through them and, ultimately, to learn how deeply we are capable of loving.
None of this means we shouldn’t wish with everything in us that they could walk through the door again. It doesn’t make their physical absence hurt any less, and it certainly doesn’t make grief disappear. But perhaps it gives us another way to understand what has happened. They have not disappeared into some distant, unfamiliar place. They have returned to a state the soul already knows, while we remain here to continue the life that is still ours.
Maybe that is one of the greatest things Spirit has taught me. We come from love. We are changed by love while we are here. And when this physical life is over, love is the only thing that remains that is real.
In the end, the soul’s journey isn’t about how long we were here. It’s about how deeply we learned to love. If there is one thing I know for sure, it’s this: the bonds of love cannot be destroyed by physical death. They transcend time and space.
Kim Russo
"The Happy Medium"
