Making Room For Grief

September has always felt like the start of a new year for me. A time for new routines, new schedules, and setting goals. I still feel that, but now it’s braided with grief. The temperature. The colour of the sky. The energy in the air as bus drivers get ready to return to their routes.

I feel it in my body.

September has a way of bringing awareness to the hole in my heart, the one that is the shape of my daughter. It reminds me of all the first days of school I witnessed, from JK through Grade 12. The backpacks, the new shoes, the excitement and nerves.

I think sometimes we misunderstand what it means to move forward after loss. We imagine that, eventually, grief will become smaller. Quieter. Less present. That there will be a point when we can say we’ve “moved on.” And sometimes, it really does feel that way.

Until a smell, a sound, a song, a familiar place, or a time of year brushes up against that quiet, sleepy grief and wakes it with a jolting ache.

I strongly suspect that for many of us, “moving forward” means pushing grief down, without giving it an opportunity for release or expression. I understand why. Expressing it hurts. Deeply. It takes the wind out of your sails and brings you to your knees. What I’ve learned, though, is that the alternative feels like a relentless, chronic gravity pulling you down.

In the first year after Kamila died, these moments felt like regressions in my grief journey. Like I was going backwards. It was really difficult to not perceive them that way. But I’ve come to understand that letting myself feel the pain and ache when it comes knocking on the door is part of how I unburden and keep feeling alive. I’ve learned to bask in the easier days, and to feel so grateful for them. Knowing all too well that it will feel hard again.

So here I am. The beginning of a new school year. The beginning of another season. Another September, without her.

Somehow, I begin again.

Embracing Grief: A Weekend Nature Retreat

My lived experience of profound lost has inspired me to start facilitating retreats alongside my psychotherapy practice. Embracing Grief: A Weekend Nature Retreat will be offered for a second time this coming May. A space for adults who are grieving someone they love, to step away from the fast pace of everyday life, spend time in nature, and be with others who understand what it means to carry loss.

On the last day of the grief retreat this spring, one of the participants came up to me and said, “I’ve been thinking about Kamila a lot since I’ve been here. About how she’s the reason we are all here together this weekend.”

My eyes instantly filled with tears. I felt such a deep sense of purpose and meaning in those words.

Kamila’s death has somehow given birth to something I never could have imagined. A meaningful gathering of people who may have never otherwise found one another. A space where grief can be spoken about, felt, witnessed, and shared.

I would give anything to have Kamila here. And yet, somehow, her life and her death continue to ripple outward, bringing people together and creating something rooted in love.

Registration for the May 6–9, 2027 retreat opens September 28, 2026, on what would have been Kamila’s 25th birthday.

[Join the interest list or learn more about Embracing Grief Retreat]