The well and the garden

There is a distinction I find useful between grieving and mourning. Grief is internal: private, personal, carried in the body. Mourning is external: visible and communal, the part other people can witness and respond to. Western culture has almost entirely collapsed the two, treating grief as something to get through privately and quickly while offering very little in the way of a container for mourning.

The Irish wake and the Jewish shiva understood something we have largely forgotten. Mourning serves grief. The communal witness, the stories told and the permission to swing between howling and laughing in the same evening are how grief moves through a person rather than lodging in them.

I learned a lot about this at a workshop run by the grief educator and coach Christy Roberts. Christy came to the work through her own loss. Two weeks after she launched her business full time in March 2020, her son Aaron died in a car accident, the same weekend Melbourne went into its first lockdown. She talks about grief as something you have to learn to live with, because there is no way around it, and she shared a way of picturing it that has stayed with me: the well and the garden.

In acute grief, the well is full to the brim and there is nothing else. In early grief, the water begins to drop and a garden starts to grow at the edges. The loss hasn’t shrunk, since the well is always the same size, but life begins to grow around it. In mature grief, there is a beautiful garden. The well is still there and you know exactly where it is, but you have learned to live around it, which is different from getting over it, and different again from pushing through.

The garden doesn’t grow on its own with time. It grows from what you do with the time.

Time can soften the edges, but pain that isn’t processed, named and witnessed accumulates rather than heals. Grief is as physical as it is emotional. It shows up in sleep and digestion, in the heart and the immune system, in a jaw that never quite unclenches. Christy put it plainly: pushing through is suppression, not strength. What gets suppressed tends to come back, often as a version of you still organising your life around an old wound without knowing it.

Every loss needs its own space. Stacking losses on top of each other and calling it resilience is one of the quieter harms of a culture built around productivity. The death of a person, the end of a relationship and the loss of a future you had planned for each carry their own grief, and so do the secondary losses that follow: the routines, roles and friendships that changed shape alongside the main one.

Work shows how little room we make for any of this. In Australia the legal minimum for compassionate leave is two days, and most people go back still in acute grief, with the well full, expected to perform as though the garden had already grown. A culture that took grief seriously would design for mourning, with time, ritual and people who know how to sit with loss rather than fix it.

Grief is, at its root, an expression of love. The deeper the love, the deeper the grief, because they are the same thing seen from either side of a loss. To grieve deeply is not a failure of resilience or an excess of feeling. It is the honest measure of what mattered.