I am Natalie Simms.

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For years, I worked in human resources. My job was to sit across from people during their hardest moments and actually listen. I learned that grief rarely announces itself the way we expect it to. It shows up quietly, in the space where something used to be.

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We are taught to grieve people. A parent. A partner. A friend. But grief does not stop there.

You can grieve a place you had to leave and never got to say goodbye to.

You can grieve a version of your life you thought you would still be living.

You can grieve a relationship that did not end in death, but ended all the same, and left you carrying the loss with nowhere to put it.

 

I write for all of it.

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The losses that come with a funeral, and the ones that do not. The ones people understand right away, and the ones you have to explain, or stop explaining, because no one quite gets it.

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This is not a place for stages or timelines. It is a place for what is actually true. You are allowed to grieve the thing you lost, whatever it was. You do not need permission, and you do not need to justify it to anyone, including yourself.

 

I write to sit with you in that, the same way I once sat with people at their hardest moments, and to offer you something honest to hold onto while you find your way through.

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