The grief I know most intimately is not the kind that comes with a funeral. Ten years ago, my mum stopped talking to me. She is still alive — but the relationship as it was has ended. And for a long time, I didn't even know I was allowed to call that grief. Because when someone is still alive, there is no public ritual, no shared language, no one who fully understands the weight of loving someone you can no longer reach. People would say, just talk to her. But you cannot repair a relationship when only one person is willing. So this grief lived quietly in my body, it showed up as heaviness, as an armour, as fear in relationships, as that old familiar loop: I'm not good enough. They're going to leave.

Looking back, I can see that grief had been shaping me long before I had a name for it. The estrangement. Single motherhood. Watching my Pop die;  sitting with him, holding his hand, experiencing both the beauty and the confrontation of that moment. Working in an animal shelter, witnessing loss in so many forms. And slowly realising that some of what I carried wasn't even mine, it was inherited. Grief passed down through my family line in silence, in closed hearts, in the things we were never allowed to speak.

I met grief in the eye when my older, and only, brother was diagnosed with cancer. We lost him in just 8 months. In this journey, I could see he was holding a grief far heavier than any diagnosis; the estrangement of his sons, years of silence and pain that expressed itself as anger, workaholism, and a body under relentless stress. I believe he died of grief as much as cancer. And his death brought to the surface everything I had been quietly holding too.

In my late teens I had four important losses: two dear friends and two cousins, each in sudden, devastating ways. I didn't know how to grieve them. Nobody taught me. So I kept living as if nothing had happened.

Years later I left Mexico and migrated to Australia with my husband Alex,  a conscious, joyful choice. For decades I didn't feel entitled to grieve what I was leaving behind because I had chosen to go. Motherhood brought so much joy and a silent feeling of guilt. What I didn't understand was that it wasn't really guilt at all. Grief and guilt so often travel together. And for a long time I couldn't tell them apart.

I also had two miscarriages I didn't know how to grieve and parts of myself I ignored for years. Those losses had been quietly living in me for decades, unnamed and unacknowledged, waiting for a moment big enough to finally be felt.

I wish someone had taught me about grief when I was young. That is why SoulWork holds space for all ages. We know that grief literacy is one of the greatest gifts we can give the next generation.