We are never taught how to grieve. We may have a notion of it, some knowledge, even experiences that resemble it, but nothing truly prepares you: life is made of grief.
We are constantly saying goodbye—to versions of ourselves we no longer are, from childhood to preadolescence, from adolescence to adulthood, to everything we once believed was permanent and never was. And then there are other kinds of grief. The ones that tear you apart differently. The ones people romanticize, as if pain held some kind of beauty, as if losing someone were only poetry. But it isn’t. There are no clear answers there. No perfect closure. No immediate lesson that justifies everything. There is only a void you have to learn to inhabit.
There are griefs no one names. They have no ritual, no flowers, no clear goodbyes. There are no hands to hold you, no exact words to explain them. They are silent, invisible, almost illegitimate. But they weigh on you. They are the griefs of losing someone who still exists in the same world as you. Someone who breathes the same air, walks the same streets, but no longer inhabits your life. And so you don’t know how to mourn it. Because they haven’t gone away. But they’re not here either. They remain suspended in a kind of limbo, where what hurts is not the physical absence, but everything that will never be. The versions of you that never came to exist. The conversations left unfinished. The promises you didn’t know you had made, but that lived within you as a certainty.
No one tells us about those pains that make you want to tear off your own skin, pull out your heart just to stop feeling; about how, to coexist in this world, it is sometimes necessary to shift the focus of your gaze. To see differently, even when it hurts. No one tells us that one of the worst kinds of death is the death of the worlds we build: the illusions, the stories we took as real, the futures we inhabited without even realizing it.
There are sorrows so deep they distort time. Days become endless, dense, almost impossible to get through. And it is there that something else begins to appear. Art. Not as an escape, but as translation. Because when words are no longer enough, reading becomes the place where someone else says exactly what you didn’t know how to say. Books begin to speak to you the way someone else once did. Underlined sentences become conversations. Pages become company. Photography, on the other hand, begins to return your gaze. It becomes that moment where you look at yourself and recognize yourself again, without needing anyone else to validate who you are. As if, little by little, you were reclaiming your own eyes. And music… music becomes everything that was left unsaid. The “I love yous” that never arrived, the “stay” that was never spoken. But also the “I am here,” which now comes from you.
Because there is something that isn’t said enough: healing hurts. It hurts like hell. It’s uncomfortable, it means confronting yourself, letting go over and over again of what you wish you could still hold on to. Sometimes it even becomes a kind of addiction: you sink into that process, you surrender to it, even knowing that it is breaking you in order to rebuild you. And then you understand something deeper: life is made of grief. And maybe that’s why what truly matters is not avoiding it, but learning how to hold it.
Photography by Emmanuel Solís
