Good Grief

By Cynthia de Lorenzi

Grief has a way of taking up residence in both the body and the mind. It moves in uninvited and rearranges everything — your routines, your thoughts, your sleep, even your sense of gravity. A few weeks ago, I lost my beloved husband, Larry Nelson, and ever since, I’ve been wandering through my days in a kind of stunned suspension, grappling with an overwhelming sense of loss and a strange disconnection from the woman I thought I was.

I keep wondering: Why does grief feel like this? Why does it shake us so completely? And is there, somehow, such a thing as “good” grief?

These questions have been sitting with me — sometimes gently, sometimes like a weight pressing into my ribs — and slowly, I’m finding the beginnings of answers in the love Larry and I shared, the life we built, and the community now holding me steady as I learn how to walk in this new world.

The Body-Mind Shock of Grief

Grief is not just an emotion; it is a physiological event. The first days after Larry’s passing felt as though my mind and my body had stopped speaking to each other altogether. My thoughts floated unanchored, like helium balloons caught in the rafters. My body moved through rooms with unfamiliar weight, as if it had been reassigned to me without instructions.

This is what people don’t tell you:Grief distorts time.It rearranges appetite.It interrupts sleep.It plants fog in your brain.It makes your bones feel hollow and your chest too full.

And yet, with all this heaviness, I have not had my deep, heart-wrenching cry — the one that breaks something open. The one people talk about as if it is a storm that cleanses the earth.

I am terrified that when the tears finally come, they may never stop. That they will sweep me away in a tsunami I can’t control. So instead, I sit with this pressure behind my ribs, this fullness behind my eyes, and I wait for the moment when my body decides it is safe enough — or brave enough — to let go.

Grief doesn’t follow rules.It follows its own timing.The body always knows what the heart can’t bear yet.

The Love That Made the Loss So Deep

Our love language was humor — the kind that bubbles up unexpectedly and fills a room with warmth. We were Ricky and Lucy, George Burns and Gracie Allen. Larry had a gift for wit so quick it could outpace a gunfighter in a Western. He had a mischievous sparkle in his eye that often told the joke before his mouth did.

He loved me, our children, and our granddaughter fiercely and without condition. He loved his friends. And he especially loved my girlfriends — not in a salacious way, but in a way that only a man utterly confident in himself can be. He delighted in their brilliance, sass, and sparkle. He found women endlessly fascinating, endlessly amusing, endlessly wise. He reveled in their magic.

This is the truth at the heart of loss:Grief is simply love with nowhere to land.The deeper the love, the deeper the quake.

When Even Animals Grieve

One of the unexpected comfortings of this time has been remembering that grief isn’t uniquely human. Dogs wait by doors that will never open again. Horses lower their heads when a beloved companion is gone. Elephants trace the bones of their dead with their trunks.

Something in this softens me.

If even creatures who cannot speak their sorrow feel the ache of absence, then maybe grief is woven into the natural order of things — an instinct that arises out of connection itself.

It tells me that love, in all forms, matters.That loss is universal.That grief is an ancient inheritance.

A Parakeet, “Just Sleeping” — and My First Lesson in Loss

Because humor is the thread that runs through my life — and Larry’s — it feels right to include a piece of it here.

When I was very young, our Southern household was loud, chaotic, and full of rambunctious energy. One day our pet parakeet died. My mother, overwhelmed and not quite ready for the tempest of childhood tears, simply… left it there. In the cage. Hoping we would think it was sleeping.

Even now, it makes me laugh — a desperate maternal prayer that the laws of childhood observation would override the laws of nature.

Of course, we figured it out. The tears came.But looking back, I realize it was my earliest lesson in grief:

Loss comes for all of us, even in small and feathered ways.Sometimes we pretend not to see it.Sometimes we laugh to soften it.Sometimes we grieve before we know what grief truly is.

The Sacred Paradox: The Warmth Inside the Absence

A few days ago, we celebrated Larry’s heavenly birthday. I wrote to him that morning — an instinct I didn’t plan, but one that arrived with surprising clarity. As I wrote, I felt both the weight of his absence and the warmth of his presence.

I told him:

It feels impossible to celebrate this day without hearing one of your quick-witted jokes or seeing that mischievous twinkle in your eyes… Today, on your birthday, I feel the heaviness of your absence — but also the warmth of your presence in every laugh you gifted us and every memory you left behind.

This is one of the strange, sacred paradoxes of grief:

Absence and presence can coexist.

We don’t end our relationship with someone when they die — the relationship simply changes form. Memory becomes the heartbeat. Stories become the language. Love becomes the tether.

**A New Mexico Lesson:

Finding Beauty in Día de los Muertos**

When I moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, I found Día de los Muertos — the celebration of the Day of the Dead — a bit macabre. The skulls, the marigolds, the altars. The way people spoke of their dead with such familiarity and color and joy.

It felt foreign to my upbringing, where death was solemn, quiet, tucked away in hushed tones and funeral parlors.

But over time, living in this vibrant desert community, I began to see the beauty of it — the way it treats death not as an ending but as a continuation. A remembrance. A love letter across worlds.

When Larry died, this tradition reached out its arms to me.

I created an ofrenda for him — an altar covered in candles, marigolds, photographs, and little items he loved: a favorite treat, a toy that made him laugh, a symbol of his career. Our children and granddaughter made their own ofrendas too, each one a little shrine of love.

In this desert tradition, I found a new way to hold him.

The ofrenda was not macabre.It was luminous.A celebration, not a shattering.A way of saying: You are still part of us. You always will be.

The Legacy of a Beautiful Life

When I announced Larry’s passing, I wrote about the man he was — generous, loyal, endlessly witty. A stockbroker turned technology trouble-shooter. A man shaped by early tragedy, raised by a mother whose grit, humor, and folksy wisdom taught him to face life with a wink and an open heart.

This is part of grief too:

The ongoing influence of a life so intertwined with your own that its absence rearranges your future.

He is gone from our kitchen table, but he is still in our decisions, our stories, our laughter, our rhythms. He is in the way we tease, the way we forgive, the way we gather around each other now.

Grief is the echo of a life that mattered profoundly.

Held by the Hands of Others

One of the most surprising parts of this journey has been the way people have shown up — with meals, with cards, with hugs, with memories they were suddenly eager to share. Some arrived quietly and sat with me without saying a word. Others talked, laughed, or cried beside me.

Their kindness has sustained me in ways I could never fully articulate.They reminded me that I am not grieving alone.

We grieve individually, but we heal communally.

Every story people told me about Larry widened the circle of love around him — and around me. Grief doesn’t shrink the world; it can expand it in unexpected ways.

Curiosity in the Dark

My nature has always been curiosity. Even now, in this strange liminal space of widowhood, I find myself asking questions:

What is grief trying to teach me?What can others who have walked this path tell me?How do we integrate loss into a life that keeps moving?Where do I go from here?

I talk to friends who have lost spouses and partners.I walk with those who have buried children or siblings.I listen. I ask. I absorb.

This curiosity is not an escape from grief; it is a way through it.A form of survival.A reaching toward the tiniest points of light.

And I am learning that grief is not just something that happens to us.It is something that shapes us.Softens us.Opens us.Rearranges us in ways we didn’t consent to — but may one day understand.

What “Good Grief” Might Really Mean

I don’t know everything that grief will ask of me yet. I don’t know how my life will rebuild itself around this absence. I don’t know when my deep cry will come, or what will finally open that floodgate.

But I do know this:

There may be something “good” woven into grief — not in comfort, but in clarity.

Good in the way grief reveals the depth of our love. Good in how it binds communities. Good in the way it teaches us to cherish laughter, touch, and time. Good in how even childhood losses — yes, even the death of a parakeet — teach us the earliest shape of sorrow. Good in how loss softens us toward others who are hurting.Good in how it invites us to rebuild ourselves with gold in the cracks.

Perhaps “good grief” is simply grief that is honored —felt fully,expressed honestly,held gently,and carried forward with love.

Larry, my beloved husband, you are forever missed, forever cherished, and forever making us smile.