Grief does not feel like an emotion — it feels like a place.
A world beneath the world you once knew.
In the old Greek story, Persephone is taken into the underworld, and her mother Demeter searches the earth in anguish. While Persephone is gone, the land itself falls into winter. Nothing grows. The familiar world goes cold. Time stretches strangely. Days are heavy and indistinguishable. Life continues around the loss, but it is altered, muted, frostbitten.
This is what grief feels like.
A descent.
A wintering.
A life still technically happening, but changed in texture and color.
You do not “get over” winter.
You live through it,
as the psyche rearranges itself beneath the surface.
The Descent: When Everything Tilts and the World Goes Dim
When grief arrives — through death, divorce, diagnosis, betrayal, or the quiet ending of something beloved — there is a sense of being pulled downward. Things that once felt effortless now require energy you don’t have. The ordinary becomes overwhelming. The body remembers differently. Even joy feels suspicious, like an unearned visitor.
In the myth, Persephone does not descend to be punished — she descends because life has seasons beneath as well as seasons above. Grief is not a deviation from the human path; it is the human path, at least for a time.
There is nothing unspiritual about sorrow.
There is nothing abnormal about the mind going quiet or dark.
To love is to risk the underworld.
The Unspoken Truth of Grief
Grief is not obstruction — it is initiation.
A descent that alters the chambers of the heart.
You may find:
- Some days you sob.
- Other days you feel nothing.
- Some hours bring clarity.
- Others bring confusion.
- Memories ambush you at the grocery store.
In the myth, Demeter wanders the earth — searching, raging, bargaining with the gods. The world mirrors her grief. This is how grief works — it changes the landscape. Your internal weather reacts; everything feels different because everything is different.
There is no right way to grieve.
There is only your way, and the way you are changed by it.
The Underworld Is Not Only Absence — It’s a Strange Kind of Knowledge
Grief changes perception.
Time moves differently.
Priorities reorder themselves.
What once demanded your energy no longer matters.
What once was background becomes precious.
This is the quiet wisdom of the underworld:
It strips away what was never essential and reveals what is.
Many cultures understood grief not as pathology but initiation.
As if the psyche breaks only where a door is meant to be.
The Return — But Never the Same Return
In the story, Persephone eventually returns, but she does not return unchanged. She has tasted the fruit of the underworld — she carries memory, depth, and knowledge that others cannot see. The world greens again, but a cycle has been established. The seasons are now marked by her inner world.
Grief works this way.
We return — to work, to friendships, to laughter —
but not as the same person who went down.
There is loss, yes.
But also a capacity that wasn’t there before:
- A deeper empathy
- A reordering of what matters
- A quieter strength
- A clearer sense of who we love and why
Grief is not healed by forgetting — but by integration.
By allowing the loss to be part of your story without being your prison.
A Gentle Way to Walk This Path
If you are in the descent:
- Name it — grief is a place, not a weakness.
- Allow winter — numbness, tears, anger, silence all have purpose.
- Ask what is being revealed — what matters now? what matters less?
- Hold close your inner seasons — you are allowed spring, even if winter still remembers you.
The myth does not promise that we avoid the underworld;
it promises we are not meant to live there forever.
Grief doesn’t erase love —
it is love, altered by absence, but still alive.
Whatever descends in you is allowed to rise in time.
Not as it was —
but as something true, tempered, and deeply human.