What Grief Left Behind: The Unexpected Gifts of Losing Brett

I want to say something that took me a long time to be able to say without flinching: losing Brett has been the hardest thing I have lived through, and it has also, somehow, made my life richer in ways I did not ask for and would not undo.

Those two things sit next to each other now. Not one cancelling the other out. Not a silver lining that makes the loss acceptable. Just both, true at the same time, the way grief actually works once you stop expecting it to resolve into something simpler.

I share this carefully, and not for sympathy. I share it because I think the version of grief most of us are handed, that it is only darkness, only absence, only something to get through, is incomplete. It was incomplete for me. So this is the fuller version, the parts nobody warned me about.

Going deeper into myself

Grief has a way of stripping out everything that isn't essential. The performing, the small talk version of yourself, the certainty you didn't even realise you were holding onto. What's left underneath is not comfortable, but it is honest, and I met parts of myself in that honesty I don't think I would have found any other way.

I learned things about my own capacity, my own patterns, my own deeper layers, that no amount of ordinary reflection had ever surfaced. Grief doesn't let you stay on the surface of yourself. It pulls you down into rooms you didn't know you had, and once you're there, you have a choice: look away, or actually meet what's in them. I chose to look. It changed how I understand myself, and it changed how I sit with clients doing the same thing in their own rooms.

A spirituality I didn't expect

I wasn't a particularly spiritual person before. Grief opened a door I didn't know was there. Questions about what happens after, about connection that doesn't need a body to still be felt, about meaning that isn't handed to you but built slowly, in the dark, without much evidence to go on.

I don't have tidy answers, and I'm suspicious of anyone who claims grief gave them tidy answers. What I have instead is a spiritual life that feels genuinely mine, built out of necessity rather than upbringing, and it has become one of the steadiest things I carry.

A family I didn't expect to gain

One of the things I understand now, in a way I only partly understood before, is how much it matters to grieve surrounded by people who loved the same person you did. I have grown close to Brett's family in a way that still moves me when I stop to notice it. We hold different pieces of him. Different memories, different versions, different kinds of missing him. Being able to bring those pieces together, instead of grieving in separate rooms, has been one of the most steadying parts of this whole experience.

Grief wants company. Not to fix it, not to explain it away, just to sit in the room while it's true.

This is something I now say to almost every client navigating loss. Grief isolates by default, because it can feel like no one else could possibly understand the specific shape of what you lost. But the people who loved the same person, or who love you enough to stay close while you fall apart, are not a distraction from grieving well. They are part of how grieving well actually happens.

Yoga saved me

I don't say that lightly, and I don't say it as a metaphor. In the months where I could not find words for what I felt, where talking about it only seemed to skim the surface, my mat was the one place I could actually show up as I was. Not the composed version. Not the version with something useful to say. Just the version that needed to shake, or collapse, or breathe, or lie still and let the tears come without narrating them.

Yoga didn't ask me to explain my grief. It asked me to feel it, in my body, at whatever pace that day allowed. Some days that meant movement. Some days it meant Savasana and nothing else, lying on the floor while everything I couldn't say moved through me anyway. That distinction, between talking about a feeling and actually letting your body feel it, is the same one I now build my entire practice around. I didn't learn it from a textbook. I learned it on the mat, grieving.

Both things, still true

I want to be honest about something: none of this means I am glad it happened, or that the growth was worth the cost. I would trade every bit of self-understanding, every closeness with his family, every deepened breath on the mat, to have him back. That's not a contradiction. It's just what grief actually asks you to hold.

What I can say is that the growth is real, and it happened alongside the loss, not instead of it. If you are in your own season of grieving right now, and someone has told you that you should be further along, or that you shouldn't be finding unexpected pockets of growth, or peace, or even joy inside something so hard, I want you to hear this from someone who has lived it: you're not doing it wrong. Grief has room for all of it.

You don't have to grieve alone, or explain it perfectly first.

If you're navigating loss and looking for somewhere to bring it, body and all, I'd be glad to talk. A free 15-minute call is a low-pressure place to start.