Hello Again

I disappeared for a little while.

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.

When I first began writing, I intended to keep to a schedule. But I’ve found that grief doesn’t fit neatly into a timeline. I’ve wrestled with myself, feeling a pressure to write more coherently, more consistently, to wait until I could offer a level of structure that might work better for Substack. What I eventually realised is that I don’t write like that. And if I wait to do so, I will be waiting forever.

I started Evergrief this year from a place of finally wanting to write for myself, rather than for other people’s visions and dreams. I opened this space so I could exhale. To claim space. To begin conversations about complex, chronic grief.

Whenever I reached into grief circles, I often felt unwelcome as though there was an undercurrent of comparison. I knew that mourning the life you could have lived (or perhaps even did live for a while) was worthy. I knew that processing trauma is, inherently, tending to grief. I knew that accepting life with chronic illness is to take loss as a companion. I knew that living with ongoing health issues initiates you deeply into fragility.

As a sensitive person with a heart that aches every single day, I learned pretty quickly: To love anything fully is to become an apprentice to loss.

I felt shame in claiming that my pain was big enough to be called “grief”.

When I encountered the work of Francis Weller, I resonated deeply with the understanding that we arrive at grief through many different gateways, all leading to the same well. No matter how we get there, we all know grief.

Through my time sitting in many wellness spaces, I could see the imprint of loss everywhere. I began to wonder if our shared humanity isn’t only found in knowing the pain of death — and how society shuns it — but in the many ways life fractures and ruptures us. In the truth that to be human is to be changed. To live is to feel the weight of being alive.

I write here not to offload my pain, but to create an opening, a space where all the loss you carry is welcome, where you might recognise yourself in my words.

Because I have found that grieving is often the gateway to healing. It’s a way of growing compassion and finding a way to rebuild a life that makes you want to stay.

I write because of the messages I receive- affirming the need for spaces that validate the complex pain of disenfranchised grief. For spaces that remind you, that what you carry matters. I haven’t figured it all out, but I show up here with what I have: lived experience, and the knowing that spaces unafraid of pain are how we build capacity to hold the weight of it all.

This season is full of expectation. It can be full of denial and pushing through something we are seeing collectively as much as personally.

For those of you sitting in rooms full of people who don’t understand: you deserve to be known and loved. Offering yourself moments of tenderness may seem small, but they are worthy acts of tending to your soul amid the chaos.

And for those spending this time in solitude, may you remember magic comes in many forms. I hope it finds you in the way sunlight glints on leaves, in the weight of a blanket wrapped around you, or in the simple warmth of a cup of peppermint tea.

I hope to share the Winter Solstice Almanac with you soon. My health capacity is variable right now, so I’m holding this gently and seeing what’s possible.