On my way to work one morning, a coyote burst out of the woods in front of my car. Startled, it dropped the prey it carried onto the asphalt. In my rearview mirror, I saw it waiting at the roadside, ears pricked, eyes fixed on what it had lost.
As I drove on, I couldn’t shake the image. It felt like the universe handing me a sign, preparing me in some way. Later that day, the message became clear as grief met me around every corner.
A woman twisted her wedding ring as she told me about her husband who had died three months ago. “I know I should be further along,” she whispered. “It’s been three months already.” She described the fog that dulls every sound, every color. I reminded her gently: “It’s only been three months.”
We talk about grief as if it should follow a schedule. As if the heart could be measured by the calendar. But grief has no protocol, no finish line. Its time is not linear, but circular. It returns like seasons, like tides, time and time again, and when it does, it can feel as raw as the first day.
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Later, another woman arrived with pain that always flares in September (the month her son died). For her, too, the fog has never lifted. Grief clings to her like a second skin. She described how she moves through her days, disconnected, numb.
We do this to survive grief: we step back from ourselves, hold the world at arm’s length, let life blur until it feels safe enough to return.
I thought back to the coyote dropping its prey when my car approached, releasing something it needed to survive. And how it lingered on the roadside, waiting.
Grief is like that. It tears something precious from our grasp, suddenly, without consent. We’re left stunned, speechless, grasping, waiting to reclaim what we’ve lost.
A third woman folded her hands tightly in her lap as she spoke of her mother, now terminally ill. She is already grieving, already mourning the slow fading of a once-vibrant woman.
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Grief begins in the moment we realize what we might lose. And in that moment, there are no answers, only the quiet work of being there.
That day, like so many others, I had nothing to offer grief but my attention. No remedy, no cure, no prescription, and more than often, no words.
But I remembered the coyote from my morning commute and wondered if the world offers us images like that – small signs to deepen our seeing, to remind us of life’s fragility. Maybe what I needed to notice that day was how grief, like the coyote, circles back again and again. This is what grief asks of us: not to fix, not to hurry, but to remain present.
Healing is not always about fixing, but about being with what cannot be undone. To sit beside the ache without trying to erase it. To let love hold what loss has broken.
Nature reminds us that loss and renewal belong to the same circle. The coyote circles back. The seasons turn. What falls away nourishes what will come.
And so sometimes all we can do is simply witness – to see another’s pain, to acknowledge their suffering.
Sometimes, that is enough. Because in the end, bearing witness to life’s fragility is the medicine.
We talk about grief as if it should follow a schedule. As if the heart could be measured by the calendar. But grief has no protocol, no finish line.
