Dear Grieving Ones:

I’ve been thinking a bit these past weeks about grief—the word, the experience, the process. A social worker acquaintance of mine commented that I must be very busy with my “grief work”. It struck my ears as odd to suggest that grief was some task akin to taking out the garbage or clearing outdoor pots for summer flowers. Approaching grief as a work project makes it feel like something I should put on my Things to Do Today calendar, somewhere between paying bills and shopping for dinner. 

In its simplest form, the word grief came from a Bronze Age Proto-Indo-European