Permission to Grieve Quotes

“Insisting that life stay the same post-loss is essentially the same as saying, “Let’s just pretend this never happened.” That’s an incredible disservice to the person, place, or thing that you lost. Did you love what you lost? If you didn’t love it, was it important, significant, influential, or a large chunk of your life? Did you have hopes, dreams, or expectations attached to it? Then it’s worth grieving its loss. And that loss will change your identity on some level.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“Grief looks, feels, and shows up differently to each person. Just like no two losses are alike, no two griefs are alike, either. You cannot know the full depth of another person’s experience and they cannot know the full depth of yours.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“Society doesn’t give us permission to grieve, but we can.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“Grief does not exist within a vacuum, but it also does not exist within just one life. It spreads out and affects the people “above you” in your family tree and the people who will come after you or “below you.” Grief also impacts entire races, genders, generations, and communities, and those beliefs about grief and the stories we tell ourselves about whether or not grief is acceptable, what’s at the root cause of grief, and whether or not we can recover from that grief have an enormous impact on how we give ourselves permission to grieve, whether we consciously acknowledge it or not.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“As life continues, so will grief.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“Sitting next to grief and allowing it to root through your former life while slowly unfurling into your new life requires the kind of patience, gentleness, and self-love that many of us have never had to summon before. Remember that at its core, permission is about telling the truth about where you are right now. And sometimes that truth means saying, “I don’t know.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“You are allowed to live and feel the experience of grief. By giving yourself permission to experience grief emotions and letting grief move through you, you are allowing grief (and by extension, yourself) to show up how it wants to, not how society wishes it would. There is immense self-love in that. In allowing yourself permission to feel, you are allowing your- self to show up as a whole human being, not just the parts of a human that you (or society) consider to be “appropriate,” “pretty,” or “worthy.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“With permission to grieve, we stop yelling at ourselves to be stronger or different or better in our pain and shift to witnessing ourselves instead.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“If you’re grieving, you have become—at least partially—someone you don’t recognize.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“In grief and loss, it becomes incredibly hard to recognize who we are. Grief makes us different people. Everything that we identify with—from our emotional states to our patterns to our dreams to our fears to our preferences to our core truths— everything fractures and shatters under the weight of loss.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“Grief ripples out and sends powerful tremors through our foundation, through our hobbies, through our loved ones, and through our minds. For the first time in our lives, we can- not compartmentalize the hard, the bad, or the sad. There’s nowhere to tuck it away because every single aspect of our lives is infected with and tainted by grief.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“From the time we’re children, we’re taught that the path is more important than the obstacles that appear on it. We’re told to focus on the destination rather than the journey. We repeatedly hear the story of the phoenix rising from the ashes, but we fail to remember (or conveniently forget to remember) that the ashes are made of the charred, scorched remains of the phoenix’s “life before.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“Grief is a heartbreaking, soul-crushing, brain-warping experience that not one of us would voluntarily choose to have. We would never sign up to experience the losses we’ve lived through or the pain that follows.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“The solution to grief is not a pain-free existence. It is allowing ourselves to grieve and witnessing ourselves in that process. Permission and presence are the remedies for agony and isolation.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“Grief is pervasive. It cannot be quarantined any more than love can be quarantined. Grief affects all areas of life.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“You cannot fix, change, or remove another person’s grief. You cannot “spare” someone the pain of grieving a loss. Your grief belongs to you; their grief belongs to them.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“Once grief enters your life, it remains a part of your life whether you acknowledge it or not.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“Permission calls us home to ourselves. It brings us back to where we belong. And it reminds us that we are safe, sound, and secure—even when everything around us is falling apart.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“Grievers often bear the disproportionate burden of needing to “teach” others how to support them in grief... and not everybody is a willing or capable “student.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“Allowing grief to make its mark in your life—whether you’re altering habits and routines, making art, or attending a grief event—acknowledges and honors the fact that grief is a powerful, life-altering force.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“Relationships continue even when they are radically changed by death, divorce, diagnosis, or another loss. Grief continues, too. For as long as we continue to live, we continue to grieve.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“Letting grief become action is about the body. It’s literally about taking grief outside of yourself and letting grief’s emotions and identities be expressed in the physical world around you. Whether there are witnesses or not, it’s tangible evidence that grief has called you to make or do something. The act of doing something is a visible marker that grief has had and is continuing to have an impact on your life.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“Don’t ask your losses to stay small so that you can feel safe.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“you can’t skip the uncertainty of not knowing who you are. You can’t skip the reality of having an uncertain identity. It’s often the hardest part of grief, because unlike shifting feelings that can resolve themselves in minutes or hours, shifting identities can take years to resolve. Sometimes who you are is “suspended” for a very long time before you feel like you’ve found solid footing again.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“While grief invites us to feel the full spectrum of human emotions, it also invites us to deepen our love for ourselves. That means feeling exactly how we’re feeling in every moment. That means meeting and embracing the darkest, ugliest, most conventionally “unlovable” pieces of ourselves and acknowledging that yes, even grief belongs to us, too.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“Ninety-nine percent of the time, our myths, stories, and expectations for what grief should feel like come from our minds. Where grief really lives—and where grief needs to be expressed from—is our hearts.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“Grief does not want to be held, blocked, or braced against. Grief does not want to be quarantined, scrutinized, or shamed into disappearing. Just like every other emotion, grief wants to be able to move through you, free from judgment, criticism, or camouflage.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“Grief wants to be seen, heard, and listened to... just like we do.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“When we grant ourselves permission to grieve, we make the experience of grief something we recognize, something we welcome into our lives. We allow it to show up the way it wants to through feelings, identities, and actions. We write our own expectations and stories. Our grief becomes ours again and we become more ourselves again because we actively choose to experience grief.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“Permission is the key that unlocks the door that’s been holding us trapped, muzzled, and stifled in our grief. Permission is the opposite of rejection. Permission is the opposite of abandonment. Permission lifts the weight, eases the pressure, and loosens the reins.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss