09/02/2026
🤍 I have a confession to make. I am sitting with the dust of guilt right now.
As a death doula, my life’s work is helping people navigate life, death, and loss. I talk a lot about meaning, ritual, and finding beauty in the hard crunchy spaces. But there’s a quiet guilt in that. When you’re part of a healing community, it gets really hard to admit when you’ve abandoned your own tools.
When my dad died, I lit a candle for him every single day. It was a reflex. A way to keep the connection alive when I had no words. But then, I just... stopped. Not because the love ended. The candle just became one more chore I couldn’t handle.
His altar is still up in my house, right beside my recliner. His undershirt (which he was wearing the night he died), his belt, his driving cap—surrounded by tokens we collected. It used to be a sacred place where love could land. Now? It’s just covered in dust. And I’m forced to sit here and look at that dust.
I’m learning that grief doesn’t always look like a beautiful ritual. Sometimes it looks like neglect. It looks unfinished. And that doesn’t mean the love is gone. It just means I am a human being living through a massive loss in real time, and my tank ran empty.
We need to witness grief in its avoidance and its mess, too. There is so much honesty in that unlit candle and that dusty altar. Grief isn’t always pretty. It doesn’t always give you a breakthrough when you want it to.
Sometimes it just settles over everything. And maybe healing doesn’t mean cleaning it up right away. Maybe it just means sitting in the crunchy internal feelings, with the external mess and letting it be seen.
🤍
Be Good to You
💜
