I've lost both of my parents. I've also experienced relationships that left their mark, literally and figuratively. I know what it is to face losses that everyone recognizes as grief.
But something surprised me: not every loss that affects us looks significant from the outside. Sometimes it's the very ordinary things we barely think to mention.
I once attended a week-long grief intensive where we mapped the losses in our lives—deaths, relationships, moves, and all the different changes that had shaped us.
And there I was, unexpectedly crying over my cat, Abercrombie. Not over the losses I would have predicted. Over Abercrombie.
It caught me off guard. Why did that one moment touch something so tender? What had Abercrombie meant to me that I'd never stopped to recognize?
That experience stayed with me. Sometimes a loss can seem small to everyone else—or even to us—while representing something much bigger in our own story.
This is why I created Honoring Grief & Loss: to help women notice those easily dismissed losses, understand what they meant, and begin exploring how to relate to them differently.
