We’ve got a medical model in Western culture that says that death is failure. We’ve got a psychological model that says anything other than a stable baseline of “happy” is an aberration. Illness, sadness, pain, death, grief—they’re all seen as problems in need of solutions. How can you possibly be expected to handle grief with any skill when all of our models show the wrong approach? Grief is not a problem. It doesn’t need solutions. Seeing grief as an experience that needs support, rather than solutions, changes everything.
