Grieving While Love Is Still Here

(air whooshing) (mouse clicks) (bright subtle music) Headspace Studios. (bright subtle music) Hi, and Welcome to "Radio Headspace". I'm Dora and I'm so glad that you're here. (bright subtle music) Over the last few years, I've been sitting with a kind of grief I didn't really have the language for at first. It's the anticipatory grief of watching my mom get older, especially after I moved away from home to pursue my career. Now, I know logically that this is just part of life. Everyone ages and everyone changes, but the thing about aging is that it often happens so subtly that you don't really notice it until you do, especially when it's happening to the people that you love. For me, that moment came when my mom first came to visit me in LA not longer after I'd moved to the States. I remember being so excited to see her, counting down the days, imagining our time together, thinking about the things and places I wanted to show her, and then I saw her, and something in me sunk. (birds chirping) I remember listening to a podcast on grief, and the expert had described grief as a behavioral response, how our sense of time, space, and closeness becomes disoriented when we lose someone. Their absence in our lives creates this deep sense of longing and yearning, a reaching for what used to be. This made me wonder, what happens when the person that we're grieving is still alive? What happens when that loss isn't about death, it's about change, about distance, about how a relationship looks different, or no longer looks and feels the same? Or the realization that the people we love won't always be here, or won't always be here in the ways we know. (bright subtle music) I've been noticing how much our grief is shaped by an unspoken assumption, that love comes with guarantees, that when someone enters our lives, they'll stay, or they'll stay the same. That forever is somehow promised, and when life gently or sometimes abruptly reminds us that nothing lasts forever, it can feel deeply disorienting. Not just emotionally, but existentially. So, the question I've been sitting with is this, how do we grieve someone who's still here, and how might we relate to love differently if we truly understood that nothing and no one belongs to us forever? It's a big question to be with, so even right now, take a moment to check in and notice what comes up for you. (bright subtle music) When my mom arrived in LA, there wasn't a single dramatic moment that made my heart sink. It was more subtle than that. I noticed it in the way that she walked, just a little slower than I remembered, and the sound of her voice, so familiar but softer somehow. Even her energy felt different, not worse, just changed. A few days into her visit, we went for a walk up a gentle hill to...