I am scraping the bottom of a jar of Grey Poupon that expired in August of 2023, and the sound is making my teeth ache. It is a sharp, metallic screech-the kind of sound that shouldn’t exist in a quiet kitchen on a Tuesday afternoon. There is something violent about cleaning out a refrigerator. You are confronting the passage of time in the form of congealed vinegar and fuzzy jam. I’ve spent the last 3 hours doing this, tossing out 13 different jars of things I thought I would use, things I bought when I thought I was a different person. This is how I live now. I am Phoenix L.-A., a grief counselor by trade and a structural engineer of sorrow by necessity, and I am currently losing a fight with a condiment jar.
Most people will tell you that grief is a garden. They use these soft, organic metaphors to make the pain feel manageable. They talk about ‘tending’ to your feelings, ‘nurturing’ the memory, or ‘planting’ the seeds of a new life. It’s a lie. A beautiful, flowery lie, but a lie nonetheless. Gardens are predictable. If you water a garden, things grow. If you pull a weed, it stays gone for a while. But grief? Grief is a construction site in the middle of a monsoon. It is mud and heavy machinery and the constant, deafening roar of a jackhammer inside your skull. It is structural. It is industrial. It is a project that never quite passes inspection.
Foreman, Not Gardener
I remember sitting in my office 13 weeks ago with a man who had lost his husband. He told me he felt like he was failing because his ‘garden’ was full of thorns. I looked at him-I really looked at him-and I realized I had been teaching it wrong for years. I told him, ‘Stop trying to be a gardener. Start being a foreman.’ We don’t grow through grief; we build around it. We reinforce the foundation so the weight of the absence doesn’t collapse the whole house. I’ve made at least 43 major clinical errors in my career, but the biggest one was ever suggesting that grief was something natural that just ‘resolves’ itself like a seasonal bloom. It’s a construction project that requires 24-hour shifts and a lot of expensive permits you never asked for.
The Density of Heavy Air
There is a specific kind of silence that happens when you realize the person you love isn’t coming back for dinner. It’s not a quiet silence. It’s a loud, buzzing pressure in the ears. It reminds me of the 1993 flood in my hometown, where the water didn’t just push. It had weight. Sorrow has a literal density. I’ve seen clients who have lost 23 pounds in a month not because they aren’t eating, but because the sheer physical effort of carrying that heavy air consumes every calorie they possess. We are talkers, usually. We talk about ‘closure’ as if it’s a door you can just click shut. But in my 23 years of practice, I’ve never seen a door that stays closed. The wind always catches it. The house always shifts.
I think about the technical aspects of holding a life together. It’s a series of mechanical failures and successes. Take, for instance, the way we manage the environments we inhabit. When you are grieving, the temperature of a room feels different. You are perpetually cold, or you are suddenly stifled. You become hyper-aware of the drafts. You notice the cost of keeping a house running when the life has been sucked out of it. We spend so much time analyzing the ‘why’ of our pain that we forget the ‘how’ of our survival. We need tools. We need systems. Sometimes, the most spiritual thing you can do is fix the literal climate of your home. The air in a house changes when it’s empty. You notice the draft. You notice the cost of keeping 3 rooms warm when you only live in one. We obsess over the internal climate, but sometimes the external one is the only thing we can actually fix with a remote and a call to minisplitsforless before the winter hits. It’s about the infrastructure. If you can’t fix the hole in your heart, you at least fix the HVAC system so you aren’t shivering while you cry.
The Shoe Relic
I once had a client, a woman of 63, who refused to move her late daughter’s shoes from the hallway. For 3 years, those shoes sat there. She treated them like sacred relics, but they were actually a tripping hazard. We spent 13 sessions talking about the ‘sanctity’ of the shoes. Then, one day, I told her she was building a shrine instead of a bridge. She got angry. She called me heartless. And maybe I was. But 3 days later, she moved them. Not because she was ‘over’ it, but because she realized she was tired of tripping in the dark. That’s the construction site mentality. You don’t move the shoes because you stop loving the person; you move them because the site needs to be cleared for the next phase of the build. You are still building the same house, but you need a walkway that doesn’t break your neck.
–Insight: Clarity requires clearing the path, not sanitizing the memory.
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Dirt, Not Time
I’m looking at the mustard again. Why did I keep this for so long? I probably bought it for a barbecue in 2023 that never happened. Or maybe it happened, and I just don’t remember it because I was too busy pretending to be okay. That’s the thing about the ‘garden’ metaphor-it encourages this idea of passive growth. Just wait, and time will heal. But time doesn’t heal anything. Time is just the dirt. You are the one who has to shovel it. You are the one who has to pour the concrete. I’ve seen people wait 33 years for ‘time’ to heal them, only to find they’ve just been standing in a muddy field for three decades. They are wet, they are cold, and they are no closer to a roof over their heads than they were on day one.
“At least I didn’t lose a child.” Blueprint for a shed.
Bad project management. Focus on the immediate task.
You can’t build a house out of clouds. Ground the materials.
True resilience is the ability to work in the rain without resentment.
– Structural Integrity Motto
I realize now that I’m still holding the spatula. My kitchen floor is covered in 3 different colors of expired sauces. It looks like a Jackson Pollock painting if Jackson Pollock was depressed and lived in a suburb. I’m exhausted. I’ve been awake since 3:43 AM because the hum of the refrigerator felt too much like a human voice. This is the reality of the work. It’s messy and it’s unglamorous. There are no ‘stages’ that go in a neat line from 1 to 5. It’s more like a spiral. You pass the same point of pain over and over, but hopefully, each time you’re a few floors higher up. You’re building the tower as you go. You’re looking down at the same mud, but your perspective is shifting.
Mechanical Failure, Spiritual Repair
I’ve been criticized for my lack of ‘warmth’ in these sessions. A colleague once told me that I treat grief like a mechanical failure. I didn’t argue. I just thought about the 53 people I had seen that month who were drowning in ‘warmth’ but still couldn’t breathe. They didn’t need a hug; they needed a respirator. They needed someone to tell them that it was okay to be a construction site. It’s okay to have scaffolding up for years. It’s okay if the blueprints change mid-way through. I once worked with a man who was 73 and had lost his wife of 43 years. He spent the first 13 months trying to ‘find himself.’ I told him he wasn’t lost. He was just under renovation. The ‘him’ that existed with her was a completed structure. That structure was demolished. Now, he was tasked with using the salvaged bricks to build something else. It wouldn’t be the same house. It wouldn’t be as big. But it could still have a fireplace.
Grief Maintenance Schedule (Years Active)
33 Years
People waiting for time to heal often just stand in the mud.
We are obsessed with the idea of ‘moving on.’ We want to get past the construction phase so we can show off the finished product. But what if the building is never finished? What if the beauty of the human experience isn’t the architectural marvel at the end, but the grit of the workers on the site? I see so much dignity in the 3 AM sobbing. I see so much strength in the woman who finally throws away the 2023 mustard. These aren’t signs of ‘healing’ in the traditional sense; they are signs of maintenance. They are the daily grind of keeping the site operational.
HARD HAT
The Final Blueprint
If I could go back to the beginning of my career… I would tell her that the goal isn’t to make the pain go away. The goal is to build something strong enough to hold it. Pain is a permanent resident. You just have to build a guest room that’s comfortable enough that it doesn’t have to scream to be heard.
(Mistake #83: Telling a grieving father ‘everything happens for a reason.’)
As I finally drop the mustard jar into the trash, I feel a slight shift in the air. The kitchen is cleaner, but it’s also emptier. That’s the trade-off. Every time you clear the site, you feel the vastness of the space you’re trying to fill. It’s 4:03 PM now. The light is hitting the floor at a sharp angle, illuminating the dust motes. I have 13 minutes before my next call. 13 minutes to sit in the ruins and plan the next wall. It’s not a garden. It’s not a path. It’s just work. But it’s the only work worth doing. If you didn’t have the hole in the floor, where would you keep the light?