Grief, Love, and the Sacred Work of Connection
By Carl Patterson
If you could invite three people to dinner, dead or alive, who would they be?
It’s a prompt we’ve all encountered, usually tucked into icebreaker games, casual get-to-know- you circles, or personality quizzes. But for some of us, it isn’t hypothetical. It’s a longing. A table we’ve imagined over and over, full of voices we ache to hear again. Chairs we wish were never left empty. A place where grief and gratitude might sit side by side, pouring tea and laughter between stories.
If I could invite three people to dinner, they’d be seated before the food even hit the table: my grandmother, my father, and my uncle Curtis. An unusual pairing to say the least with my father being the wild card and adding to the unique family dynamic.
I’d cook something slow and Southern. Sweet tea in mason jars. Collard greens kissed with smoked turkey. Fried green tomatoes. The kind of cornbread you don’t need to ask directions to, it just finds your mouth.
My grandmother is from Kentucky. My father is from Alabama. My roots know flavor and memory. My uncle is from the garden state and he laid his foundation on grit.
I’d light candles, not for ambiance, but for remembrance. The kind that flickers inconsistently, but alive. I’d ask Grandma about the rituals she carried in her hands when she cooked. I’d ask my father why silence followed him like a shadow. And I’d ask uncle Curtis why laughter always sounded better coming from him. But more than questions, I’d let presence do the work.
Because that’s what grief teaches us. That love, in its purest form, is presence. Not perfection. Not performance. Just the sacred act of showing up.
Grief Is Not the End, It’s the Echo of Love
Grief doesn’t leave. It changes outfits. One day, it’s the lump in your throat when a certain song plays. Another, it’s a quiet smile that sneaks in when someone uses their phrase. Or the way your body pauses before joy, because joy feels like betrayal when someone you love is no longer here. But grief is not a problem to be solved. It’s a presence to be befriended. A wound we live with. A scar that can still feel the weather.
Saul Williams wrote, “Grief dares you to love once more.” And I believe that’s what healing looks like, not forgetting, but remembering how to love again without guilt. To open our hearts wide enough for joy to sit next to sorrow.In therapy, I often ask, “How do you still carry the ones you’ve lost?” Because they don’t leave us, not really. We become the living vessels of their wisdom, their flaws, their laughter. We become a continuation.
Danez Smith says, “Some people can’t be buried, they live too loud in our bones.” And they’re right. Some people aren’t gone. They’ve just become ancestors we haven’t yet learned how to talk to.
Loss Shapes Us
Grief isn’t a detour from life. It is life. As Hanif Abdurraqib writes, “The hardest part of grief is learning how to carry it in a world that refuses to make space for your mourning.” We are taught to move on, to get over it, to perform resilience, as if grief is a chapter we can close. But what if it’s a companion? What if it becomes part of our language? Loss reshapes our time. It warps our memory. It pulls us into reflection, not just about the one who passed, but who we were with them and who we’re becoming without them.
Clint Smith says, “Grief is the last act of love we can give to those we loved. Where there is deep grief, there was great love.” That’s why rituals matter. That’s why storytelling matters. That’s why saying their names matters.
In my poem A Call to Pops, I wrote, “i remember when my grandfather died. i watched as my mother’s bones ached, her tear ducts became a desert, and each day she prayed to have her dad back as she tried to find the strength to continue on. that taught me to remove you from the coffin I placed you in, inside of my heart.” Watching my mother grieve helped me understand the importance of holding space for the living and reminded me to keep a space open within my heart for the deceased.
If love is memory, then grief is gospel. Because loss is the way we keep repeating what mattered. Saying it loud so the silence doesn’t win.
Therapeutic Truth: Connection Is Healing
During therapy sessions, I often witness how unprocessed grief becomes unspoken shame. How we carry a sense of failure for not saving them. Or guilt for feeling relieved. Or confusion about how to talk about a parent, a child, a grandparent, a friend, a dog, when the world expects us to return to “normal.”
But normal is gone.
Grief rearranges the furniture of your soul. Nothing sits quite the same again. So what do we do?
We honor them. We build relationships that feel like safety. We say “I love you” more often. We check in with our friends who are quiet. We ask better questions. We cook the food slowly. We show up with a casserole and time. We learn that connection, when done intentionally, reflectively, and with sacred presence, becomes the most powerful form of grief work there is.
In my poem, The First Time I stated, “the first time my father attempted to hug me…i hugged him back. i wa twenty nine. he died eight years later not before returning the pieces of me i thought i’d never get back.” Even during grief the shattered pieces of you can become a mosaic; durable, versatile, and beautiful.
What if healing was just letting the light hit what we’ve tried to bury? That’s what therapy is. That’s what love is. The light. The table. The return.
A Note on Collective Grief
Some of us carry more than personal loss. We carry the grief of the community. Of ancestral trauma. Of a world that hasn’t always made for our mourning. When you’re part of a people who have learned to grieve in motion, while cooking, while working, while surviving, grief can get trapped in the body.
That’s why we honor Black grief.
Queer grief.
Immigrant grief.
Cultural grief.
It’s sacred.
It deserves to be honored.
Letting your grief breathe is a radical act of restoration.
Grief as a Doorway to Meaningful Connection
Therapy isn’t about fixing grief. It’s about being with it. It’s about sitting in the ashes and daring to believe that something sacred still remains. As bell hooks reminds us, “Love is an action, never simply a feeling.” When we grieve well, we love well. We remember well. We live well. And when we form new relationships not just romantic ones, but friendships, mentorships, spiritual kinships we do so with a deeper understanding of what it means to show up.
“Grief changed me,” a client once told me.
“But it also gave me the courage to love without pretending.”
If You’re Grieving, You’re Not Broken
You are evidence that love existed. If it still hurts, it still matters. You’re not behind. You’re not weak. You’re human. You don’t need a perfect closure. You need a space wide enough for remembering.That’s the sacred work of therapy. Of poetry. Of presence. And that’s why, even now, I set the table.
Grief Is a Shape-Shifter
Grief doesn’t always arrive with flowers and casseroles. Sometimes it slips in quiet, draped in the clothes of exhaustion. It hides in the pauses of our conversations and the deep breath we take before answering someone’s “how are you.” It has a way of rearranging us, reordering our inner lives until nothing feels where we left it.
I want you to know you’re not broken. You’re becoming. This ache that you feel, the one pressed between your ribs or leaking from the corners of your eyes it’s not a flaw. It’s a signpost that says something mattered. Someone mattered. That love existed here. Grief is not just about what was lost. It’s also about what remains. The stories that still echo, the meals we try to recreate, the phone numbers we never delete, the songs that still make us pause. And sometimes grief is the only thing that reminds us how deeply we are wired for connection. When a person we love is no longer here, it creates a sacred rupture. A sacred longing. And yes, sometimes, a sacred silence. But here’s what I want you to hear. You are allowed to grieve at your own pace. There’s no timeline, no finish line, no set of rules that define what healing must look like. Some days you might laugh so hard it scares you. Other days you may not want to get out of bed. Both are allowed. All of you is welcomed here.
As a therapist, I often tell my clients: grief is not something to get over. It’s something we learn to carry. And even in the carrying, we can grow strong. You may not return to who you were before, but you will become someone new, someone shaped by love, loss, and the courage to feel it all.
Let yourself miss them. Let yourself love them still. Let yourself be held by memories that keep unfolding in new ways. Grief is not linear. It is a spiral, a wave, a tide that comes and goes. It shows up in the most ordinary places while folding laundry, driving down a familiar road, standing in the aisle at the grocery store staring at their favorite snack. There’s no shame in that. It just means they mattered.
You don’t have to carry this alone. Let therapy be a place where you don’t have to pretend. Where you can whisper their name and not be rushed. Where you can tell the truth about how you feel and be met with gentleness instead of expectation. Your grief deserves that much. You deserve that much.
So I’ll say it again. You’re not broken. You’re becoming.
Let your grief be part of your becoming.
And when you have time, set the table for the living and let the flowers be your centerpiece.
A Closing Ritual
So light a candle. Set a table. Speak their name. Show up for your grief and your love like they deserve to sit together. And so we carry them, not as burdens, but as belonging.
We are at the table now.
The story.
The warmth.
The memory made flesh.
Reflection Questions for Grief and Healing
- Who would you invite to your table, and what would you want to say?
- How has loss reshaped your identity, your values, or your relationships?
- What rituals do you practice, or wish to practice, to honor loved ones who have passed?
- What kind of love and connection are you most craving right now?
- What would it look like to allow your grief to breathe, without judgment?
- In what ways have you honored your pain instead of hiding it?
- What version of yourself is grief trying to introduce you to?
