Learning to Sit Inside Grief

A reflection on my father’s sudden death and what it means to stay with loss

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There are moments in life when the work you’ve been doing quietly, internally, suddenly collides with reality in a way you could never plan for.

My dad died a few days before we were supposed to launch Shift.

After months of emotional healing, reflection, and reckoning with childhood pain I thought I had already dealt with, I was thrown back into grief in its rawest form. Not the kind that feels poetic or enlightening. The kind that knocks the air out of your body and reminds you that healing doesn’t protect you from loss — it simply changes how you meet it.

Over the last year, and especially after my experience at Hoffman, I began to understand something I hadn’t before: how much anger and grief I had never actually let myself feel, and how that anger and grief was showing up in my life and in my health.

I had learned how to be strong. How to intellectualize pain. How to move forward. But I hadn’t learned how to stay with the feelings that didn’t resolve neatly — the anger that felt disloyal, the grief that felt endless, the resentment that coexisted with love.

At Hoffman, I learned that forgiveness isn’t something you grant once you’ve transcended your pain. It’s something that often comes after you finally let yourself feel it. That empathy doesn’t mean excusing harm — it means seeing clearly, without abandoning yourself in the process.

I didn’t realize how much I needed that forgiveness for me.

And I didn’t realize that learning how to hold anger and grief without pushing them away would reopen a door I thought had been closed for good.

Last November, after years of distance, I reached out to my dad. Carefully. Tepidly. Cracking the door open just enough to see what might happen.

What I found surprised me.

He greeted me with love, genuine remorse, and a desire to earn his way back into my heart. He wanted to know me. He asked me hundreds of questions. He couldn’t see enough pictures of my life. He shared memories from my childhood with clarity and tenderness that reminded me of who he had been before everything fell apart.

And in those conversations, I was reminded of him too.

Of his sharp memory, his intellect, his passion for the subjects he loved. Of how we bonded over watching the news and talking about whatever I was learning in school. Of how his love language had always been protection — tracking the weather, the news, the threats he thought he could shield us from.

He didn’t have an easy life growing up. And so he put everything he had into giving us what he thought would make us happy: the best schools, a beautiful home, vacations, holidays that looked perfect from the outside. A trampoline. A basement room turned into a stage when I loved ballet and performing.

When I was about to turn thirteen, my brother died unexpectedly by suicide.

That loss shattered our family in ways I didn’t yet have language for. It was devastating for me, for all of us — and it was the moment my dad’s world went dark. His grief became depression, and over time, that depression pulled him into addiction, and turned him into someone I didn’t recognize.

It was also the first time I learned how to be strong. How to keep going when something unbearable happens. How to push through pain and grief because there was no other option.

I lost my dad in my late teens and throughout my twenties. His depression pulled him deeper into pills and further from us. His spending unraveled the life he had worked so hard to create. I learned how to live without him, just as I had learned how to live without my brother.

I grew stronger than I ever should have had to be.

And yet, when I reached out, there he was — present, remorseful, sober, open.

One night, when I told him I would answer all of his questions in the morning, he wrote:

“No rush, sweetie. I expect it’ll take more than a few days to catch up years. By the way, your messages have filled a rather large hole in my heart and I am very grateful. So take your time, I’m not going anywhere.”

What I didn’t realize at the time was that talking to him was filling a large hole in my heart too — one I hadn’t fully acknowledged was still there.

I also didn’t realize we wouldn’t have time.

In our last conversation, he expressed concern about me being in New York during a cold snap. He asked — carefully, no pressure — if I’d be open to visiting him in Dallas the next month when I’d be in Austin. I told him I would love that. He was thrilled.

Now I won’t be visiting him in Dallas. I went to handle the logistics of his death instead.

The cruelty of being one month away from seeing him in person after seven years is softened only by knowing he’d be relieved I spent the weekend in seventy-degree Texas and not freezing in New York.

There is still so much I wish I could say to him, even though I have re-read our messages over and over again to make sure he received the most important things. That I love him. That I remember the good times. That I forgive him. That I am happy.

He cared so much that I was happy.

The day I heard the news, I did something I never would have allowed myself to do in the past.

I drew the blinds. I got into bed. And I let myself cry — not quietly, not politely, but fully. I sobbed. I let myself feel every part of it: the pain, the regret, the loss, the anger. I didn’t push it away. I didn’t try to numb it. I didn’t tell myself to be strong or composed or grateful.

I cried for my brother. For the life I thought I would have. For the version of my childhood that ended too early. For the little girl who couldn’t understand why the men she loved most — the people who were supposed to protect her — also hurt her.

And as I let myself really feel that grief, something shifted. I began to feel relief.

Because the emotions we work so hard to avoid don’t disappear. They get stored. They wait. They show up later — in similar moments of loss, in pain in our bodies, in patterns in our relationships, in the ways we brace ourselves against love.

This time, I stayed.

After I heard the news, I sent him a message. I knew he would never read it, but I didn’t know what else to do. That message thread had become the place where I finally got to know him again.

I told him I’m grateful we found each other again in this lifetime. I told him that I love him. That I forgive him. That I know he loves me. That I know he’s with my brother now. That I’ll talk to him every day.

I am holding gratitude and anger at the same time. Gratitude that I reached out before it was too late. Anger that he was taken from me right as I was starting to feel safe again.

Sometimes I wonder if he held on all this time because he wasn’t ready to leave without saying he was sorry — and without hearing that he was forgiven.

So much of my life has been shaped by loss. By learning how to live with it, heal from it, and do everything I can to prevent it from happening again.

This work — the work we’re doing at Shift — isn’t about bypassing pain or becoming immune to it. It’s about learning how to feel, how to soften, how to stay present even when it hurts.

When the grief quiets, I find comfort in believing I now have two guardian angels. Free of pain. Together again. Close by, even when I can’t see them.

This is not a story about closure. It’s a story about opening — opening to grief, to forgiveness, to empathy, and to the truth that healing doesn’t make life easier, but it does make life feel more honest. And as the wounds start to heal, they make space for love to find its way back in again, even when it’s scary.

With love,

Marissa