Word: Grief

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Sentence:

Grief is what we carry when something we loved can no longer stay the same.

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Passage:

I did not have the language for educator grief when I first experienced it.

I just knew I was tired in a way sleep did not fix.

During one school year at Harper, we lost eight students to gun violence. I knew their names. I knew their stories. I knew how they died.

One of them, Cedric, I watched take his last breath.

And then, somehow, we kept going. That is what schools do.

The crisis team comes. The plan gets made. The staff is gathered. The students are checked on. The family is called. Everyone moves into care mode because there are children in front of us who still need to be held.

But what I did not understand then was how much grief I was carrying too.

I would leave school and go home alone. I would sit with everything I had seen and everything I could not unsee. I looked for ways to bury it. Most of them were not healthy.

At the time, I thought grief mostly belonged to death.

I did not understand that grief also lives in the smaller endings we do not always know how to name. A school year ends and the room will never hold the same people in the same way again. A colleague leaves the team and the rhythm changes. A child packs up for college and the house gets quieter. A job ends after you poured your soul into it.

A role changes.
A relationship shifts.
A season closes.
A version of your life is over before you are ready to let it go.

That is grief too.

Not always the kind that stops the world.

Sometimes it is the kind that quietly changes the room.

And if we do not make room for grief, grief will make room for itself.

Sometimes grief pulls us apart. It makes us quiet. It makes us isolate. It convinces us we are the only ones carrying what everyone else is trying to survive.

But sometimes grief brings us together.

At Harper, losing students forced us to move differently. We went deeper into relationships. We listened harder to students’ stories. We created safety plans for weekends and breaks. We looked at data differently because a child’s life was no longer an abstract outcome.

The school found clarity inside the chaos.

But I was still carrying my grief alone.

That experience is part of what later led me to help start the School Leader Care Team. In a large system, people often know how to respond to the crisis, but not always to the person leading through it. The school leader checks on the students, the staff, the family, and the plan.

But who checks on the person checking on everyone else?

Who cares for the caregiver of the caregivers?

That depends a lot on leadership.

A leader can rush people past grief in the name of getting back to normal.

Or a leader can slow the room down enough for people to be human.

Making room for grief does not mean we stay inside the pain.

It means we stop pretending the pain is not in the room.

It says the loss was real.
It says what you are feeling is real.
It says you do not have to carry this alone.

I wish I had known that earlier.

I wish someone had told me that grief was not weakness. That grief was not something to outrun. That grief was part of loving people deeply enough that their absence changed you.

I know that now.

Grief can shrink us when we carry it alone.

But when we make room for it together, it can also connect us, soften us, and remind us what still needs to be cared for.

Not back to what was.

But forward into something more honest.

Something more human.

Something that lets love keep carrying what loss has changed.

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I love hearing your stories. If this brought one to mind, drop it in the comments.

Your Turn:

What is one ending you did not realize you were grieving?

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