Empty and Full at the Same Time
Why Grief Stays in the Body
I’ve been spending a lot of time grieving this summer. I didn’t intend it that way. I had planned a summer of exploration, long days languishing on beautiful Algarve beaches, swimming in the evening with Sophie and coffee in the morning light on my terrace.
But it didn’t happen this way.
It began with the opening of an old wound that I thought had healed. Ecuador. I won’t go into the details here, suffice it to say Ecuador lured me back, to the country, to the people and to the pain.
The result of that excursion cost me peace and well-being. Returning home I thought I could separate the events from my beautiful life here in Portugal. But I returned with extra baggage carried in my body. For most of August I have been incapacitated with extreme pain in my left hip. Diagnosed as a rare condition called ischiofemoral impingement gave it a medical name, a place in the body, but it did not point to the source.
I have been completely and utterly incapacitated all month. Nothing to distract me from the pain that screams in my hip. Nowhere to hide from it. Long stretches of hours lying in bed without any distractions, only pain.
I’m quite certain that the wound that opened began to bleed and in doing so, opened past wounds wanting their time again. It is all held in this word: grief
Grief is rarely the problem.
The problem is what we believe grief is doing for us. Somewhere beneath the ache, a quiet belief is embedded. If I stop grieving, I stop loving. If the weight lifts, the love goes with it.
So we keep the weight. We call it loyalty. We call it remembering. We carry it up the stairs and into the new job and into the next relationship, or perhaps to a new country, and we tell ourselves this is what devotion looks like.
But consider the price of that bargain. It asks you to keep a wound open in order to keep a love alive. It asks pain to do the work of memory.
What would it cost you to love without hurting?
Sit with that question longer than is comfortable. Most people flinch at it, (I did) and the flinch is the information.
The body keeps the score
The mind is a skilled negotiator. It can declare a matter closed. It can say I've processed that, and produce evidence — the therapy, the reading, the year(s) that passed, the composure at the dinner table.
The body is not a negotiator. The body is a ledger. It simply records.
So the grief goes down. Into the shoulder that won't release. Into the sleep that thins out around three in the morning. Into the jaw, the gut, the chest that tightens when a certain song starts in a grocery store. Into the exhaustion that no amount of rest touches, because it isn't the kind of tired that rest was built for.
And then one day — often years later, often over something small — the body sends the invoice.
We tend to meet that moment as a malfunction. Something is wrong with me. We go looking for a diagnosis, a supplement, a discipline, an explanation for what is happening in the moment. Sometimes those are exactly right, and I'd never tell you to skip them.
But sometimes the symptom is not a malfunction. It's a message that finally found a delivery route.
Where in your body do you already know the answer to this?
Don't think your way to it. Notice where your attention went the instant you read the question. That is not nothing. That is the ledger opening.
We were never given the passage
Here is what I find most people are actually starving for, and rarely name:
There was no ceremony, no ritual to claim an ending to suffering.
In most of the modern world, we have almost no sacred passages left. We have a funeral, if we're lucky, and it lasts an afternoon. Then the casseroles stop. The messages thin. And by week three, someone says the sentence — isn't it time — and you learn that your grief has become a social inconvenience, something to be managed privately, like a debt.
Older cultures knew better. They marked things. A year of mourning clothes. A wall of the house left unpainted. A meal cooked on a certain day. A name spoken aloud in a circle of people who all stopped what they were doing to hear it. These weren't decorations. They were scaffolding. They gave grief a shape, a room, a door, and — this is the part we've lost — an ending that didn't require forgetting.
Ritual is how a culture says: this was real, and now you may put it down, and putting it down is not betrayal.
Without ritual, there is no permission. And without permission, grief has nowhere to go but inward and downward, into that ledger, where it waits.
This is why so many people describe the same impossible sensation: hollowed out and overfull at once. Empty and full at the same time. Empty of the person, the life, the future they were building. Full of love that has nowhere to be delivered.
The love didn't go anywhere. It's still being produced. It just lost its address.
Make the passage yourself
Nobody is coming to hand you a ceremony. The culture that used to build them isn't building them anymore. So you build one.
Not elaborate. Not performed. Not posted on social media. Ritual doesn't require an audience — it requires intention and a witness, and the witness can be your own awareness, fully present, which is rarer than most people think.
Give it a time. An actual date, on an actual calendar. Not someday when I feel ready, because that day is designed never to arrive.
Give it a place. Somewhere you can be uninterrupted and slightly uncomfortable. Comfort tends to keep things shallow.
Give it an object. Something that carries the weight so your body doesn't have to — a letter, a photograph, a stone, a ring, a bowl of water. Something you can hold and then set down. Set down is the whole point.
Give it words. Say what was true. Say what you never said. Say what you're angry about, because grief without anger is usually incomplete grief. Then say the love out loud — plainly, without literary flourish — and let it land somewhere outside your body.
And give it an end. A moment where the ritual is over and you stand up and walk out. That ending is the medicine. It is the thing our culture forgot to give you.
You may need to do this more than once. Grief moves in seasons, not in a line, and a passage marked in the first year may need marking again in the fifth. That isn't failure. That's simply how the ledger clears — one entry at a time.
The question underneath
Here's what I'd leave you with, if you'll take it:
If your grief could speak, would it ask you to keep carrying it — or would it ask to be honored and released?
You already know. You've known for a while.
The love was never the thing you were being asked to let go of.
The love is the only thing that stays.
