My grandmother passed away four years ago. She was a large part of my childhood, and in the years since she's been gone I have thought about her more than I ever did while she was alive. Grief does that. It returns the person to you in a different form, after you no longer have them in the form you were used to. If you have ever lost someone you love, you already know that no writing can touch what you carry. Words don’t go where grief goes. I write this knowing that, and knowing some of you are reading it while the loss is still raw, and others are reading it while carrying something older that never quite settled.
Nothing here will lift what you’re carrying. The Stoics never claimed their philosophy could. What they offered, and what I want to pass on as carefully as I can, is a way of thinking about grief that doesn’t shame you for feeling it and doesn’t trap you inside it.