What I Wrote for The Mighty About Grief, Trauma, and Losing My Husband
In 2020, I wrote a personal essay for The Mighty about something I have not often spoken about publicly — the experience of losing my husband to cancer, navigating complicated grief as a mother of twins, and what that season of my life taught me about loss that no clinical training could fully prepare me for.
The piece is called "Plastic Smiling." That phrase captures something I see constantly in the people I work with — the gap between what grief looks like from the outside and what it actually costs on the inside. I lived that gap. I dressed carefully on the last day of my husband's life. I wore red lipstick. I looked pretty because he needed to see me look as normal as possible. Inside, nothing was normal. Nothing was fine. But I had learned, as many of us learn, how to perform composure when composure was the last thing I had.
What Complicated Grief Actually Means
Grief is not a linear process, and complicated grief is even less so. By the clinical definition, complicated grief refers to loss that remains debilitating and distressing well beyond the expected timeframe — where the pain does not soften in the ways most people assume it should. It does not mean grieving wrong. It means grieving something whose weight does not follow a predictable schedule.
In the essay, I describe my own process as a complex mixture — sadness, anger, raging, depression, and plastic smiling, all at once and often in the same hour. My twins went through the same jigsaw maze. Grief in a household does not move uniformly. It moves differently through every person, and it often goes unnamed because the family's collective need to appear functional keeps every individual from speaking what they are actually feeling.
How Personal Loss Shapes Clinical Work
I wrote the piece because I believe therapists who have navigated real loss bring something to clinical work that cannot be taught. Not as a credential or an advantage — simply as a reality. When I sit with a client who is carrying grief that no one in their life is naming, I recognize something in that experience. The particular exhaustion of being expected to have moved on. The grief that lives in the body when the mind has been forced to perform normalcy.
My grief work with clients grew from this personal experience. I specialize in grief, trauma, and loss — and that specialization is not theoretical. It is lived.
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What I Want People Who Are Grieving to Know
The advice I offered at the end of that essay still holds: find a therapist you trust, give yourself time without rushing the process, and find your source of meaning and joy in whatever form that takes. These are not platitudes. They are things I have actually had to do.
If you are carrying grief that feels too complicated to name — loss without a funeral, loss that others have stopped acknowledging, loss that arrived slowly or too suddenly — you are not doing it wrong. You are doing it the way it requires to be done.
What Complicated Grief Looks Like in the People I Work With
The clients who come to me carrying complicated grief rarely arrive calling it that. They arrive calling it exhaustion. Numbness. A persistent sense that something is off but they cannot name what. They are high-achieving professionals, caregivers, and faith leaders who have kept moving — because moving was what the life required — and have arrived at a point where the momentum is no longer enough to outrun what they have been carrying.
What I notice is that complicated grief often does not look like sadness. It looks like irritability that arrives without context. Like difficulty concentrating on things that used to come easily. Like a flatness where feeling used to be. Like the sense of going through motions in relationships, in work, in roles that once felt meaningful. The grief is there — it is simply running underneath everything else, unnamed and therefore unaddressed.
This is particularly true for people who grieved while still responsible for everyone around them. Parents who held it together for their children. Leaders who kept showing up for their organizations. Caregivers who were so focused on the person they were losing that there was no space to process what that loss was costing them. By the time the acute season passes, the grief has no obvious place to land — and so it settles into the body, into behavior, into a quiet erosion of the self that can go unrecognized for years.
This is the grief I am trained to work with. Not only the loss of a person, but the loss of a version of your life, your identity, your sense of what the future was supposed to hold. If you recognize yourself in any of this, you are not behind in your healing. You are simply in a place that needs real attention — not more time.
Read the full essay on The Mighty →‘Plastic Smiling’ My Way Through the Process of Grief
Grief is one of the areas I am most honored to work in — and one of the places where I bring the most of myself. If you are navigating loss and are looking for support, I would welcome a conversation. Schedule a consultation →
For more on how I work with grief and life transitions, visit my Grief, Loss & Life Transitions page.
