A Note on Grief
It's time to stop running
I watched a video last week.
Mark Burk, helping his dog grieve after his wife passed from cancer. The whole thing from the tenderness, the ritual of it, the quiet acknowledgment that grief isn’t just a human experience hit me so hard my chest physically ached.
And I sat there, surprised.
Not because I was sad. But because I could still feel like this. Like the heart hadn’t calcified yet. Like the work; the medicine, the death, the professional distance I’ve learned to maintain hadn’t turned me into someone who just observes suffering without feeling it.
But I felt it. My God, I felt it.
And here’s what I did differently this time: I didn’t run.
The Reflex to React
Usually, when an emotion hits that hard, the reflex kicks in immediately: Make it stop.
Scroll to something funny. Text a friend. Put on music. Do something, anything to short-circuit the feeling before it settles in too deep.
We’ve been trained to react to every emotion like it’s an emergency. Sad? Fix it. Anxious? Distract yourself. Angry? Vent. Lonely? Scroll until you’re numb.
But what if the emergency isn’t the emotion itself? What if it’s our refusal to sit with it?
Antoninus Pius once told a young Marcus Aurelius, who was consumed with grief after losing a teacher: “Let him be human for once. For neither philosophy nor the empire takes away natural feelings.”
Even the Stoics knew: feeling is not weakness. It’s human.
What a Stoic tries to do is not be carried to excess by these natural feelings. We try not to be enslaved or destroyed by them. But we *feel* them. We let them move through us. We observe.
My Decision
So I sat there. Chest tight. Throat thick.
And I observed.
Not in a clinical way. Not like I was diagnosing myself. Just… noticing.
This is what grief feels like when it’s not yours but you recognize it anyway.
This is what empathy costs.
This is the ache of knowing that love, all love, ends in loss. And we do it anyway.
It hurt. It really did.
Maybe because it’s my field of work. Maybe because I’ve seen too many versions of that video play out in real life, families sitting vigil, holding hands that will soon go cold, whispering goodbyes that never feel adequate.
Or maybe it hurt because I’m still capable of hurting. And that, strangely, felt like a relief.
If you’re still here and you’re thinking “this is heavy,” you’re right. But stick with me. And if you want to support someone trying to feel things instead of just intellectualize them, the links are at the bottom.
The Stoic Paradox
People misunderstand Stoicism. They think it’s about not feeling. About being a robot. About walking through life unmoved, untouched, invincible.
But that’s not it at all.
Marcus Aurelius wrote:
“Those who do not observe the movements of their own minds must, of necessity, be unhappy.”
Observe. Not suppress. Not deny. Observe.
The Stoics weren’t asking us to be emotionless. They were asking us to be conscious. To notice what we’re feeling. To name it. To understand it. And then, only then to decide how to respond.
Epictetus said it plainly: “We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.”
I couldn’t choose whether that video would make me sad. But I could choose not to run from the sadness. I could sit with it. Let it teach me something. Let it remind me I’m still human.
What Observation Looks Like
Here’s what I learned sitting with that ache instead of running from it:
It didn’t last forever. Emotions are like weather. They pass. The sadness peaked, lingered, and then… softened. Not because I *fixed* it, but because I let it run its course.
It didn’t destroy me. I was afraid that if I let myself feel it fully, I’d get stuck there. But the opposite happened. By letting it in, it moved *through* me instead of lodging inside me like a splinter.
It connected me to something bigger. That ache wasn’t just about the video. It was about every patient I’ve lost. Every family I’ve watched fall apart. Every time I’ve had to deliver bad news and then walk away like it didn’t cost me anything.
It did cost me. It costs all of us. And pretending it doesn’t is how we burn out.
The Wisdom of Motion PIcture
There’s a moment in Inside Out (yes, I’m quoting a Pixar movie, a source of wisdom in its own regard) where Sadness finally gets to do her job. And what happens? Riley doesn’t fall apart. She heals.
Because sadness, grief, loss, the hard emotions we try to avoid, they’re not the problem. The problem is when we refuse to let them exist.
In Good Will Hunting, Sean tells Will: “It’s not your fault.” And Will breaks. Not because Sean made him weak, but because he finally gave him permission to feel what he’d been running from his whole life.
That’s what observation does. It gives you permission.
A Practice, Not a Perfection
I’m not saying I’ve mastered this. I haven’t.
There are still days when I scroll instead of sit. When I distract instead of observe. When I react instead of respond.
But I’m trying. And that video, that ache I didn’t run from, reminded me why it matters.
Marcus Aurelius said:
“External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now.”
The sadness wasn’t the problem. My fear of the sadness was.
And when I stopped fearing it, when I just let it be, it became something else. Not pleasant. But not unbearable either. Just… human.
A Question for You
What emotion are you running from right now?
What feeling have you been scrolling past, distracting yourself from, refusing to sit with because you’re afraid of what it might do to you?
And what would happen if you just… observed it? Not forever. Not even for long. Just for a minute.
What if you let it be there without needing to fix it, explain it, or make it go away?
I’m genuinely curious. Let me know.
Until next time,
Stay jiggy (and maybe let yourself feel something this week).
P.S. — “Let him be human for once.” That’s permission. For you. For me. For all of us.
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This is well-wrought. I thought the video was deeply human too. It’s not easy to stay through emotions but it is important that we do.
*will run from emotions when I can though 😝*