The first time grief showed up at my door, I slammed it shut. I was 21, my mum had just died, and I was by no means ready to let my grief in. I didn’t know how to do this grief thing. So I did what I did know how to do: I locked it down, found something else to focus on, and carried on.

It took me a long while to start feeling again after that. To figure out how to be sad about my mum, yet excited about life. Then my dad died, and I became a student once more — figuring out life as an adult orphan, finding new depths and layers to my grief, again reevaluating what it is that makes life worth living for me.

It was around this time that I first discovered grief work, grief tending, grief circles — when I learned that I wasn’t alone in this experience, and that I didn’t have to experience all of it alone.

The more I grieved, the more I became aware of the myriad of ways loss had already been laced throughout my life and had gone unnoticed, unfelt. The lack of belonging I experienced as a teenager, the years I lost to an eating disorder, the family I lost to grief, the trust I lost in friends. I realised grief is woven through our life in varying threads; constant in its presence, varying in its intensity.

And now we’re here. Grief Pilgrims has grown from the earth that was so rudely upturned all those years ago. It has blossomed from the seeds that were planted and that I patiently tended to over the years until finally they broke above ground. This work, to sit with grief and give it space, has become one of the few things that have made sense to me since losing my dad. It combines my grieving soul’s yearnings with the skills and knowledge I have obtained over the years.

I hope you feel welcomed and held by what it has become.