A Better Map For Grief

Grief doesn’t follow a clean five-step route, and a lot of people feel worse because they think it should. We start from a different place: Psalm 23 and the honest promise of walking through the valley, not around it. Here is something practical and gentle map that doesn’t pretend the terrain is easy, but helps you find your footing when life after loss feels unreal.

We talk about where the “five stages of grief” story came from, why it was never designed to describe the grieving, and why real mourning can look like accepting the loss at 9 AM and raging against it by noon. Instead of treating grief as a linear checklist that ends in closure, we reframe the grieving process as a landscape: quiet stretches, sudden cliffs, anniversaries, triggers, and blank spaces no one else can chart for you. If you’ve been searching for grief support that doesn’t shame you for cycling emotions, this perspective can be a relief.

Here are three landmarks you can return to. First, the weather changes even when the land stays, so a stormy day doesn’t mean you’re going backward. Second, Lois Tonkin’s model shows how grief may not shrink, while your life expands around it through new routines, relationships, and capacity. Third, modern grief research on continuing bonds gives you permission to keep a healthy connection to what you lost, through ritual, memory, and the voice you still carry.

If this resonates, subscribe, share the episode with someone who’s grieving, and leave a review so more people can find this kind of steady companionship.

Art, Artifacts, Fabric and Design:  https://www.etsy.com/shop/vasonaArts?ref=seller-platform-mcnav and  https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/candee-lucas and https://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/vasonaarts

ELECTRONIC BOOKS:  1000 IMAGES OF JESUS  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F2SFH4Z6

Music and sound effects today by:   via Pixabay

Transcript

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Welcome And A Circle Of Support

Candee 0:31

Welcome to Solace: Soul + Grief. I'm glad you're here. My name is Candee Lucas. I'm a Jesuit trained spiritual director and chaplain. When we started this ministry, we'd hoped to reach out to those who are grieving, both new to the path and those who had been on it for some time. You're always welcome in this circle of healing love and support.

Psalm 23 And Lifelong Trust

Candee 1:07

We're all familiar with the words of Psalm 23. --Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.-- Psalm 23 is traditionally attributed to King David. It's one of the most widely accepted Davidic Psalms among scholars, both conservative and critical, partly because its pastoral imagery fits naturally with David's own background as a shepherd before he became king. Psalm twenty three reads less like a reaction to an event and more like a mature reflection on a lifetime of trust. David, looking back over years of being led, protected, and provided for, and distilling that into a single extended metaphor. God is shepherd, David is sheep. Scholars have offered a few educated guesses about the origin. It is believed to have been written later in David's life, possibly after the throne was secure, as a reflective psalm rather than a crisis psalm. It also may be in response to a period of danger, given the line about the valley of the shadow of death, and enemies present at the table. Some scholars connect this to the flight from Absalom or from Saul, but many scholars believe it was written for general worship use, rather than a specific moment, which would explain why it has stayed so useful across many millennia and many situations, including grief. Today it reads as valid whether you're in immediate danger in a season of loss or simply looking back on a long walk you've already survived.

Why Grief Needs A Map

Candee 3:32

I want to start with a question. If I asked you to draw a map of your city, could you do it? Probably roughly. You'd sketch the main roads, a few landmarks, maybe your own house. It wouldn't be too accurate, it wouldn't be to scale. But it would be true in the way that matters. It would show you how to get from where you are to where you need to go. Sometimes grief needs a map like that. Not a perfect one, not one with every street named, just something to hold on to when the ground stops making sense.

The Five Stages Myth

Candee 4:17

Most of us grew up with a map of grief we never asked for. Five stages in order, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. It was tidy, it was linear. And it was a road that eventually ends somewhere called closure. Here's the problem. That map was never meant to describe the grieving. It was written by Elizabeth Kubler- Ross to describe the dying, patients coming to terms with their own deaths. Somewhere along the way we borrowed it, stretched it, and handed it to everyone who ever lost anyone. As if loss were a highway with an exit ramp. Most people in grief will tell you the truth. Doesn't really work that way. You don't leave denial behind and arrive at anger. You have a Tuesday morning that feels almost normal, and then a Tuesday afternoon that flattens you for no reason that you can name. You accept it at 9 AM and rage against it at noon. The stages aren't wrong because they're false. They're wrong because they're sequential. And grief refuses sequence. So if the old map is wrong, what do we replace it with?

Grief As A Valley To Walk

Candee 5:46

I'd like to suggest not a road but a landscape, much like the one we just heard about. Notice what that verse from Psalm twenty three does not say. It doesn't say the valley disappears, it doesn't say you go around it, and it doesn't say that faith lifts you over it. It says you walk through it. The valley is real terrain, dark, low and narrow, and the promise isn't an escape route. It's companionship on the path. That's the same shift I'm asking you to make today. From grief as a problem to be solved to grief as a valley to be walked, with the confidence that you are not walking it alone. Picture grief not as a line you walk from start to finish, but as a territory you move through, one with mountains and valleys, familiar paths and sudden cliffs, seasons that change without warning. Some regions of this territory are quiet, flat ground. You can walk for a while without incident. Some regions are steep and exhausting. An anniversary, a familiar song, the smell of a hospital, an empty chair at a table set for the same number of people it's always been set for. Minus one. And some parts of the map are simply unmarked. Blank space. Grief for a parent doesn't look like grief for a child. It doesn't look like grief for a marriage that ended, and it doesn't look like grief for a version of yourself you had to let go of. Nobody has walked your exact route before. That's not a flaw in you. That's just what unmapped terrain is. A cartographer doesn't ask When will I be finished with this country? A cartographer asks What is here? What is this ridge? What is this river? That is a far more useful question to bring to grief than when will this be over?

Three Landmarks For The Journey

Candee 8:28

If we're going to map this territory honestly, there are three landmarks worth naming. First, the weather changes but the land stays. Grief has climate, not just terrain. Some days the same valley you walked through yesterday is sunlit and passable. Other days it's the same valley, but there's a storm in it. This doesn't mean you're going backward. It means that weather moves. You are allowed to have a good day and a bad day in the same week, in the same hour, without either one canceling the other out. Second, grief doesn't shrink. You grow around it. There's a model developed by grief counselor named Lois Tonkin that I find more honest than the five stages. Picture a circle representing your life, and inside it a smaller circle representing your grief. At first, it fills almost the whole space. Everything you do, you do through it. The old model says that inner circle should shrink over time. Tonkin's model says something different. The circle of grief doesn't get smaller. Your life grows around it. You build new roads, new routines, new relationships and new capacity. And the grief stays roughly the size it always was. But it takes up less of the total territory because the territory itself has expanded. That reframe matters. It means you're not veiling if the grief doesn't shrink. You're not supposed to outgrow it, you're supposed to grow around it. And third, remember that some landmarks you carry with you. Modern grief researchers talk about continuing bonds. The idea that healthy grief isn't about severing your connection to the person or the thing that you lost, but relocating it. You don't have to let go completely to move forward. You can talk to the person. You can keep a ritual. You can let their voice still be one you consult when making a decision. The old model treated any lingering attachment as a failure to move on. We know better now. Some landmarks aren't obstacles on a map. They're part of it permanently, and that's alright. Here's the thing about maps that sometimes we forget. A map isn't meant to make the terrain disappear. It doesn't flatten the mountains, it doesn't reroute the river. A good map just tells you this is where you are and here is what's around you, and you are not lost, even though it may feel that way. That's what I'd like to offer you today. Not a promise that grief ends, not a schedule you're failing to keep, not a deadline for acceptance. Just permission to treat grief as terrain instead of a test, to notice the weather without believing it's forever. To let your life grow around the loss instead of demanding the loss shrink first, to keep the landmarks that matter, and to trust that even unmapped ground can be walked one visible step at a time. You don't need the whole map before you start moving. Nobody has the whole map. You just need to know that the ground under your feet right now, however strange it feels, has a place on it. And you are allowed to be standing there.

Closing Blessing And Where To Listen

Candee 13:06

That concludes another episode. A new one drops every Friday morning. You can find us on Amazon Music, Apple Music, and Spotify. Remember to be gentle to yourselves this week and be kind to others. Travel always with God at your side. Vaya con Dios.