10/04/2026
Staying curious about each other’s grief
Kris and I have different ways of finding rest. He likes to sit in the garage with his motorcycle, working on it while music plays. I’m more likely to take my tea, Bible, journal, or computer to a quiet corner at Starbucks or Barnes & Noble.
Those differences don’t tell me exactly how either of us would grieve. But they remind me that loving someone doesn’t mean experiencing the world in exactly the same way. We can sit side by side and still need different things.
I found myself thinking about that again at Friday’s grief gathering. One of our panelists shared that sometimes he plays his guitar and cries. When his family sees him, he feels he needs to pull himself together and reassure them he’s okay. His story made me think about a drive home from church with Kris, a few years after he retired from the military.
Our family was in the middle of a huge transition. I was telling Kris about a news story involving a veteran who had confronted college students for walking across an American flag. Kris became angry. He wondered why he had sacrificed so much time away from his family if this was what people did with the flag he had served to protect. He spoke about his disappointment in how life looked for us.
I heard the anger. I heard bitterness, even what sounded to me like a crisis of faith. What I didn’t hear then was the grief underneath it: the losses he had accumulated over 22 years in the military, and the time away from our children that he could never get back. Listening to the panelists, I found myself hearing that old conversation differently. I wondered if some of his grief had come to us through words I didn’t know how to recognize as grief at the time.
It brought me back, too, to the young couples I met while facilitating Walking Through Grief at Womack Army Medical Center. They had each lost a baby. One couple stays with me. They sat close together, yet seemed so far apart in how they understood the loss and what it was doing to them.
She was struggling so visibly. I sensed that he could see how much pain she was in, and that he had come because he thought she needed support. But as we talked, I wondered whether either of them could yet see what the loss was like for him.
He remembered his grandparents after his grandmother died. He had helped his grandfather with things around the house and watched him grieve. That experience seemed to give him a way to understand death as part of life’s rhythm. I wondered if his wife had a different history with loss, one shaped more by crisis. And she had carried their baby inside her. They loved each other and were grieving the same baby, but they had arrived at this loss with different histories and different experiences of it.
I don’t want to turn these stories into rules about how men grieve or how women grieve. But I do think the messages we receive about who should be strong, who should show emotion, and who should take care of everyone else can shape how we carry grief—and how easily we recognize it in someone we love.
When I hear the words from Romans, “weep with those who weep,” I hear an invitation to come close to another person’s grief without needing to feel it exactly as they do. Maybe we can begin with a gentler question: What has this loss been like for you?
And then give each other the time and room to answer. 💔❤️🩹💝💞
