Offering: February 2026

Am I grieving?

I’m offering a few one-on-one tarot sessions this month, plus have a workshop and reading group open for sign-up. All details and links are at the bottom. <3

When I started studying grief, I wasn’t grieving a death. A series of losses in short succession had dissolved some of my most taken for granted life structures and I turned to language, as always. At the time, I was enrolled in a narrative therapy training with Jill Freedman and Gene Combs, which helped me get curious around the stories I had grief about and what it means to be grieving.

I had narratives that said grief happens in stages, that it’s something you experience when someone close to you dies, that it isn’t linear. But I was surprised to find out that despite more than a decade in the psychology field, I was pretty much out of ideas after that.

For lack of better options, I leaned into the stages idea. As philosophers Matthew Ratcliffe and Eleanor Byrne have written, shared ways of understanding grief can function as a kind of scaffolding when other life structures have eroded. Interpretive frameworks like the stages model, can “sustain or impose structure and guide action during times when practical identity is compromised¹.”

Speaking about grief experience in shared or familiar terms—like bargaining or anger, or even well-worn metaphors like “grief comes in waves”—can also protect us from being over-exposed socially, in the rawness and vulnerability that profound loss often entails². There was a huge difference between telling someone I was “in the bargaining stage” and telling someone my days were drenched in a diffuse sense of desperation that was punctuated exclusively by wishful thinking. The first was manageable, the other made people deeply uneasy.

One of the big ideas in narrative therapy is that we often have “thin” narratives about ourselves and our problems that tend to benefit from some thickening. Part of thinking in this way involves looking for details that stand outside the narrative; the less usual and unchosen facts that stand outside of the dominant story.

One way to do this is to look at the words you find yourself using and ask yourself how well they fit. In my summer of loss I went through a period of compulsive monologuing aloud in my house by myself and sometimes on walks. This, too, I might’ve called bargaining. But I think it would’ve fit better to say that I was enacting a habit. I was speaking to someone specific and rehearsing a connection that I’d come to count on, which I was now in the severe leg on the curve of unlearning.

I started reading philosophy—and phenomenology in particular, which I was (and still am mostly) bewildered by—in hopes of understanding the bewilderment of losing more than I could process at once. In hindsight, I suspect my turn toward philosophy was a kind of instinctual, homeopathic remedy for disorientation. That slow process of getting my bearings with the things I was reading seemed to mirror the task of gradually regaining a sense of myself in a world that had flipped upside down.

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The nature of my losses as not-due-to-deaths meant that I was drawn to philosophers who described grief as a response to varying kinds of losses, not only bereavement. I was intrigued, for example, that a significant number of respondents to the Grief Survey conducted by philosophers at University of York identified as grieving over involuntary childlessness.

This week, in the philosophies of grief reading group I’m facilitating, we’re reading an article by two of the philosophers who conducted the survey, Louise Richardson and Becky Millar on “Grief and the non-death losses of Covid-19.” In it, the authors look at how the words grief and grieving were used in popular media during the pandemic, and wonder whether the things people described grieving over, including more '“minor” things like event cancellations and venue closures, really can count as grief.

They begin with Matthew Ratcliffe’s account that grief’s “object”—or, as Richardson and Millar describe it, “what in the world grief is about…[and] seems to be about”—is a loss of “significant possibilities that are integral to the structure of one’s life, to one’s various projects, pastimes, habitual activities and commitments³.” So the argument is that when we grieve, it is not a person or relationship or job or home that we grieve, rather a loss of possibilities that were integral to who we are and have been rendered inaccessible in the absence of the person, relationship, job or home.

Richardson and Millar are careful to say throughout the paper that to endorse this idea about what grief is is not to deny the distinctions between different kinds of grief, and that there may be features that certain kinds of grief share. For instance, bereavement and other interpersonal loss experiences that involve an inability to connect with a significant person in the way one once did—someone’s gone missing, or has become ill in a way that they can no longer communicate—might share features that other kinds of loss don’t.

Some of the losses that people described experiencing during the pandemic included cancelled events and suspended activities, loss of certain imagined futures, trust in other people and in one’s country, the return to “the madness of normality” once restrictions were lifted, and “the illusion of control.⁴”

To understand how such losses might entail grief, the authors consider that grief doesn’t always require the loss of a concrete object like a person, relationship or job. Whenever the possibilities of one’s life are dependent on someone or something, it may be fair to think that the loss of that person or thing could result in some kind of grief. This makes room for the possibility that you could grieve the loss of safety or trust in significant others or the world, or even something you never had but hoped to, that contained salient possibilities for your becoming.

If people can grieve over more nebulous or hard-to-pin-down losses, one might wonder if grief at least requires the loss to be permanent. Here, Richardson and Millar note that that experiences of impermanence in the pandemic were relative to one’s own perception of and relationship to the future.

They cite the survey responses of older adults from the Covid-19 Coping Study, for whom the temporary closing-down of business as usual amounted to a loss of possibilities that, lacking the time that younger people might assume would allow them to make up what was missed, did feel or even were permanent.

The authors also argue that, while some of the non-death losses that people described from the pandemic are notably distinct in terms of how they feel and are experienced from bereavement grief, there may be more overlaps than it seems. Here, they use a term that I love, which is “affective scaffolding.”

Affective scaffolding refers to the network of resources in our surrounding worlds through which we regulate ourselves; activities, practices and other people. The pandemic undeniably altered this scaffolding, and though the majority of those alterations are no longer mandatory, pre-COVID affective scaffolding remains radically altered for the immunocompromised or otherwise continually and rightfully concerned about COVID.

Finally, the authors wonder whether people can, indeed, grieve over seemingly “minor” things, like cancelled events or entertainment venue closures. They wonder whether it might be better to call such experiences sadness or disappointment. To this, they make the important point that what may seem like a minor loss to one person may be of great significance to another.

When I was in acute, loss-induced psychological pain I recall how difficult it would be when a friend canceled plans or a therapist had to reschedule. A “minor” loss takes on a different quality when the affective scaffolding has been compromised, so what might otherwise involve being bummed out or let down is now an occasion for intense distress.

It’s also the case, write Richardson and Millar, that seemingly “minor” events may be part of what constitutes grief as a process. They give the example of giving away a deceased loved one’s clothing, which is reportedly harrowing for many. But even if the relinquishment and loss of certain clothing items is experienced as minor by the bereaved, it may “count” as an occasion for grief in that it’s part of a larger unfolding process that we refer to as grief.

One may wonder what the purpose is in fleshing out in such detail what grief is and is not. For me, it was helpful when grieving to get “validation” that there was a rigorous and convincing way to reasonably claim not only that I was grieving, but more importantly that what I’d lost might be seen by others as worthy of grief.

The need to have one’s losses recognized as significant, and the potential consequences in cases when that does not happen, is part of why this paper felt important to me. For Richardson and Millar, non-death losses can and do involve grief, particularly when they entail a “disruption to the experiential world and to the socio-cultural scaffolding available to regulate one’s affective experiences.”

“Grief and the non-death losses of Covid-19” is open access and you can read it here if you’re interested.

If you’ve read this far please do consider hitting the like button. Also I know this was a lot to read, so thank you for your time and attention. <3

Late Winter / Early Spring Offerings:

I have a handful of openings for one-on-one tarot sessions in February. To learn more about what sessions entail, click here. To book a session, click here.

The second round of the Philosophies of Grief Reading Group will begin Saturday March 21. This is an eight-week series in which we read philosophy papers about grief and talk about them. It’s not a support group, and all are welcome, especially those who are interested in thinking about grief in new ways. For more details and to sign up, click here.

Tarot: Theories and Practices Toward Unusual Knowledges is a three-hour workshop on interpretation and making meaning that will be held on March 8. I’ll share some of the ideas that have informed my own work with cards, and invite participants to do exercises that apply them. For more details and to sign up, click here.