An Apprenticeship in Fragility

grief resists containment. It is wild. It is cyclical. It is alive

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Welcome to EverGrief

Written by Madeleine Alice

EverGrief explores the many shapes of loss, especially the ones often unseen or unspoken. Offering a space to tend to the grief that most often gets left behind.

Disenfranchised grief is a term to describe grief that isn’t acknowledged, validated, or supported by society. It happens when your loss isn’t recognised as legitimate, or when you’re not seen as someone who’s entitled to grieve. This involves (but is not limited to) complex grief, relationship loss, physical/ mental illness, identity changes, transitions and endings.

Still Standing by Jeanie Tomanek

To be alive in this season is to witness both magnificence and heartbreak: the beauty of decay and the weight of endings.

We live in a culture terrified of death, and in that fear, we create more suffering. We exile the natural processes of endings: the collapses, the surrenders, the breaking apart, and in doing so, we forget that decay is a vital part of creation.

Our modern world feels much like a society in collapse, as we are asked to continue on regardless of how broken we feel, regardless of how much grief we carry for our earth, our leaders, our systems. We are trained to deny, to perform and stay functional. Yet the medicine, always, is truth. The medicine here is radical honesty, radical compassion. The willingness to see what lies beneath the surface, beneath the expectation to hold it all together.

To tend to the cycles of life, the seasons, the constant turning, is to return to our humanity. Each ending is an initiation, a renewal of our relationship with death. We do not have to rush past these moments. We do not have to “move on.” We can be impacted. We can be moved. We can be changed.

An Apprenticeship in fragility

EverGrief was born from my own inability to find a place for disenfranchised grief, the kind that lives without ritual or recognition. These living losses come with no acknowledgement, and yet are the unseen deaths that mark a life. As we know, even death itself is rarely met with adequate tending. We are expected to move on, to shrink our mourning into something manageable. But grief resists containment. It is wild. It is cyclical. It is alive. For a long time, I kept the sorrow locked inside my chest, believing my grief was not valid unless someone had died. But chronic illness has always been for me, an apprenticeship in fragility. It has shown me how close to death we live each day, and how, in illness, we are continually invited to meet impermanence.

I have lain on the floor, sick and unable to move, feeling time dissolve into the slow pulse of a body on the edge of itself. In those moments, I’ve learned how little control we have, and how much tenderness that truth demands. There is a strange relief in accepting that we are not in control, not of our bodies, our stories, or what comes next. Every encounter with illness is an initiation into death, a reminder of our own mortality, and perhaps a call to surrender.

How do you feel when you see signs of aging in your face, your body, your loved ones? How do you greet each turning of the wheel, each birthday, each shift of the season? To fully live, we must learn to hold death close.

We are being asked, always, to let go. Instead of banishing what feels too much, perhaps we can soften our grip. Let the bracing ease. Create space around the pain. Feed the life that is still here. While practicing discernment with what truly needs to be shed and what might still hold something to reveal.

John O’Donohue once spoke of the soul not being held within a body but more an expansive field that holds the entire body and beyond. I return to that often. It reminds me that we are held in something vaster than we can comprehend, and that nothing, not even death, falls outside of that holding.