When Curiosity Meets Grief

Turning questions into companions

I’ve always thought of myself as a curious person — I like knowing things. I ask a lot of questions (much to my husband’s dismay — he often says, ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I didn’t ask.’ Sigh). I like clarity, patterns, and plans. Certainty (as talked about in my last article) had always been comforting to me.

But when grief arrives (whether unexpectedly bursting into the room, or not) that all goes out the window. Suddenly, you’re dropped into a landscape where none of your usual coping mechanisms work. The questions come flooding in — but they’re not tidy ones with answers. Grief and death and loss is never really tidy, is it? It opens up whole cans of worms. Or buckets of worms. Universes of worms!

They’re messy, feel-this-in-your-gut questions.

“Why did this happen?”

“What do I do now?”

“Will this feeling ever end?”

“Who am I without them?”

“Is it weird that I can’t cry today?”

“What do I do with this much love and no place to put it?” (That’s basically what grief is – love with no where to go).

These aren’t questions that want fixing, because there is no real, definitive answers (irritatingly). They want witnessing. They want to be heard, not fixed like a puzzle to put back together, because as I’ve said before, you’re like a jigsaw with jumbled pieces that will never go right back into place how they were before.

And I think that wonder can still live, even in the complex universe of grief.

Grief Is a Question We Live

When my mom died, I didn’t just lose her — I lost the version of me who thought the world worked a certain way – the version that had my mom in it. But now that world had changed – irrevocably.

And in the depths of that loss, the questions that grief arose within me weren’t the kind I could write in a journal and get the answers to in any self-help book. They were the kind that broke me open from the inside and changed me fundamentally.

I didn’t like them. Actually, I mostly hated them. But over time I realized that it was okay to not have the answers to these questions. Or maybe there were answers, but not ones I liked, and that that was okay too. I could just live with them – in whatever state they (or I) was in.

And sometimes I noticed that the questions shifted, and I became more curious about them than seeking answers.

What If We Let Ourselves Wonder?

Curiosity isn’t certainty or being in control. It’s kinda the opposite. It’s leaning into the unknown and seeing where it takes you. It’s your inner self, your inner child maybe, asking:

‘“What might this feeling be pointing me toward?”

or:

“What would it feel like to just sit with this instead of wanting to rush past or through it?”

Curiosity lets us loosen our grip on needing to “know.” It’s kinda wonder-in-disguise and a way of staying open without needing to fix everything. It won’t change the loss, of course but shifts how we move through it. Curiosity helps me to be kinder and more compassionate to myself.

It allows me to see the bigger picture a little bit.

Grief often feels heavy – sometimes too heavy – for many of us. A way to maybe lighten that burden even just a bit are some gentle practices.

Tiny Curiosity Practices (That Don’t Require Energy You Don’t Have)

Grief can be utterly exhausting. Trust me, I know. From anticipatory grief, to complex grief and everything in between (did you know there’s actually a lot of different kinds of grief?).

You don’t need to be in a good place or feel particularly enlightened to try these. You can be tired. Grumpy. Flat. Crying. These work however you’re feeling — because grief is a mess of feelings, and there’s no tidy roadmap.

There’s no real ‘5 stages’ that everyone goes on about. Well, there are, but not everyone goes through all 5 and you could be hop, skip and jumping back and forth through a mix of them). So the last thing you want is one more thing to add to you ‘to-do’ list. But these are things you can do without any effort and they could help a lot (but don’t take my word for it – try it yourself and see how you feel!).

Ask: “What else might be true?”

When the grief doom-spiraling starts, when you say things to yourself like: “It’ll always be like this,” “I’m broken,” “No one gets it”, pause a moment. Say to yourself: What else might be true that I can’t see right now? Just asking that question creates space.

Look Up

Stand outside for thirty seconds and look at the sky. Any sky. Overcast. Cloudy. Blue. Purple. It doesn’t matter. Just let yourself be small for a second. Feel the grandness of the universe. It helps put things into a tiny bit of perspective. Kinda sorta maybe.

Catch One Small Wonder

You don’t have to feel awe to experience it. Just notice one tiny beautiful thing: the steam from your morning beverage, a patch of light, a dog’s floppy ears, a lyric that made your chest ache in a good way. That’s enough to remind you that there’s still magic in the world, even now.

Let the Question Be Enough

You don’t need an answer right now (even though you might really want one). You might not ever get an answer. So let the question be enough. “I don’t know” can be a full sentence, a place to rest without putting extra pressure on yourself that you don’t need right now.

Let It Be Incomplete

There’s something powerful about giving ourselves permission to not know. I love that don’t you? Give yourself permission. It’s something I’ve been hearing a lot lately on podcasts that I listen to. People giving themselves permission for…whatever. Like to just sit with questions. To not rush to label, solve, define them. To let grief be not just a pain to struggle through but an invitation to feel more, see more, be more real than we ever were before. That’s where the post traumatic growth happens.

You don’t have to be at peace with uncertainty. I definitely am not, as I said at the start with my previous article about finding magic in the not knowing. But you can be curious about it.

And often that’s where wonder gets in, through the crack inside of us caused by grief.

So here’s a Soft Invitation I’ll leave you with to ponder:

What question are you carrying today? Can you let it be unanswered, unresolved — just for today? To allow yourself not to fix or solve it and just be in the experience - to remind you that even here, you are still becoming.

If this letter found you at the right time, feel free to share it with someone else who might need a little wonder today.

✨ Love this reflection?
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With heartfelt thanks, always.
— Caitlin

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