The Grief That Comes With Rest

Content Warning: This post contains reflections on grief, loss, and emotional exhaustion. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.

Title: Night Shore

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

No one told me
that when the shoulders finally drop,
The tears begin.

That the body, loosening
its long-held grip on vigilance,
would release more than tension.
It would release the unlived hours,
the dinners declined,
the calls shortened,
the visits swallowed by marking,
by meetings,
by the endless proving
that I deserved to remain.

I thought healing would feel like relief.
And it does.
But it also feels like mourning
the woman who said yes
when she meant no,
who signed the third contract,
and the fourth,
who lay awake rehearsing indispensability
because dispensable meant invisible,
and invisible meant gone.

Duelo, the Spanish say.
Grief.
And duel.
As if mourning were a kind of combat,
a reckoning with all that was lost
while I was too busy to notice the losing.

I grieve the braced mornings.
The jaw that forgot softness.
The breath held shallow
like a child waiting to be corrected.

I grieve the writing set aside,
the ideas that flickered
and went dark
for lack of time
that was never mine to hold.

I grieve the woman
I might have become
had I trusted
that I was enough
without performance.

Miriam Greenspan (2003) writes
that no emotion is negative,
only refused.
That grief, if allowed to move,
becomes gratitude.

So I am letting it move.

Here by the sea
where pelicans rest between dives,
where nothing asks to be proven,
where waves keep ancient rhythm
without apology,
I let the tears come
for all the years
I kept dry.

This is what the body knows
that the mind resists:
Safety is what allows grief
to arrive.

The shoulders drop.
The sorrow rises.
The jaw softens.
The unlived life
asks to be mourned.

Healing, I am learning,
moves in spirals
from broken toward whole.
It is a spiral,
circling back
to gather the fragments
left behind
when survival required speed.

El duelo que viene con el descanso.
The grief that comes with rest.
The mourning that waits
until we finally stop.

The pelicans grieve differently than I do.
They dive when hungry.
They rest when full.
They have never been asked
to earn stillness.

I am unlearning.

Here, by the sea,
salt on my face
that might be spray,
that might be tears,
that might be both,
I am unlearning
the fear of rest.

Descansa,
the water whispers.
Rest.

And I do.
And I weep.
And both are holy.

Title: Hammock Between Roots

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

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Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

References

Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com

Greenspan, M. (2003). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala Publications.