Birthdays, Grief, and the Medicine of a Broken Heart...

Yesterday was my birthday.

I received many beautiful messages - kind words, love, wishes for a wonderful and happy day. I am deeply grateful for that love, for the remembering, for the care that reaches out to us on days that mark our existence.

And yet, like many birthdays, while happiness was present in moments, it wasn’t what people would generally call a happy day.

This year, I witnessed another death on my birthday. This time, a beloved animal transitioned to the spirit world.

He wasn’t mine. I wasn’t deeply connected to him. But I was present - to hold space for his human’s grief, to tend the body, to care for the burial with reverence and ceremony. And in doing so, my own heart once more opened to the familiar portal of grief that lives in my blood and my bones.

As Naomi Shihab Nye writes in her poem Kindness:

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, 

you must first know sorrow as the other deepest thing. 

You must wake up with sorrow. 

You must speak it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

My birthday has long been entwined with death.

Twenty-eight years ago - on this day - my first-born child died during labour. Somewhere in the 18 hours between the last regular, very normal midwife visit and arriving at hospital for her birth, life slipped quietly away. Since then, I have lived my birthdays holding the polarities of birth and death, love and loss, side by side in the same breath.

On my 40th birthday - twelve years ago - I attended my dear grandmother’s funeral. We were very close. And though she was 98, and had lived a long and vibrant life, her death cracked me open in ways that again felt impossible to bear.

Grief , however, has not confined its visits to my birthday.

As a child, my body already knew sorrow. In a world and culture afraid of grief, it moved through me as tears - flowing easily to songs, to stories, to endings, to partings. But that depth of feeling was often too much for those around me. I learned quickly that such intensity was inappropriate. Unsafe. Unwelcome.

So those feelings were pushed down - deeper and deeper - contained to keep others comfortable. They were replaced with shame, fear, and longing. And over time, that repression found its voice through my body, emerging as chronic pain - fibromyalgia - a condition I have come to understand as the physical expression of deeply carried emotional pain.

In more recent years, I have allowed myself to welcome grief back in. To meet it consciously. To come to know its textures and intelligence in ways I never had before.

I’ve recognised how grief lay dormant beneath my physical pain, protected by the threshold guardians - avoidance, resistance, productivity, independence. The ones who’ve kept me safe in a world where the full weight of heartbreak can feel utterly terrifying.

Because to let our hearts truly break can feel like we might die too.

And in a sense, we do.

This is the gift of heartbreak. It breaks open the small, contained heart into something wider, richer, more alive. Once you cross that threshold, you cannot return to who you were before. That self dies. And another is born - more whole, more expansive, more capable of holding life as it is.

Grief changes us. That’s its purpose.

It shifts our perspectives. Alters our values. Refocuses our priorities. It matures us. Deepens our wisdom. Widens our capacity for life. Grief rearranges us at a cellular level - neurobiologically, somatically, relationally. We cannot go back to who we were before loss.

And why would we want to, when the very structure of our life has been altered by a piece now missing - by a love that mattered so deeply?

Francis Weller’s words now reflect my lived relationship with grief:

“I am an advocate for grief. I see the many ways it gifts us. While it is difficult to embrace grief and be moved by its muscular demands, without it we would not know the heartening quality of compassion, could not experience the full breadth of love, the surprise of joy… Grief is the dark colour that adds depth to the canvas, providing contrast and texture. Without these tones, our lives would be flat and uninteresting.”

The invitation, of course, is not to live a life consumed by sorrow - but to allow grief its rightful place. To welcome the sorrows that come to us. To meet them with presence and embodied awareness. To give ourselves, and one another, permission to feel grief fully when it visits.

To refuse grief is not to escape it. 

Refusing it simply moves it underground - into the shadows - where it resides beneath the surface of our days, shaping our experiences, our moods, our responses.

We may become adept at functioning, achieving, holding it together - living, but feeling only half-alive. We become numb to the depths - carrying an unnamed despair and a persistent longing.

Life continues. But its richness remains just out of reach.

When we begin to turn toward grief - when we re-establish a conscious relationship with it - we notice how life shifts. Not just within ourselves, but around us. And something even larger than our own healing begins to emerge.

We begin to change an entire culture.

We become part of the creation of a culture - a new way of being - where grief now has a place at the table. Where it is no longer uncomfortably shunned, but welcomed, held, expressed, and honoured for the beauty, generosity, and depth of love it reveals.

Yesterday was my 52nd birthday.

Today is my daughter’s 28th birthday.

And today I am loving, grieving, and living this day fully - with a heart broken open widely enough now to hold it all.

For "Grief is itself a medicine.” — John Cowper

"Grief is itself a medicine"