Blog 3 Grief- You Don’t Know What You Got, Until It’s Gone.

Grief: “You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Until It’s Gone”

Grief has a way of softening us. It strips away the noise, the arguments, the ego, and the old stories we’ve rehearsed for years. In Buddhist psychotherapy, this softening is sometimes described as the opening of the heart and mind. The place where suffering exposes what truly matters underneath. And nowhere is this more visible than in families.

Every family carries its history of old wounds, rivalries, misunderstandings, words said in anger, the need to be right, and resentments. We fight with parents, argue with siblings, distance ourselves from brothers & sisters, and slip into patterns that feel impossible to break. In the moment, we believe we have endless time, time to be angry, time to be stubborn, time to postpone forgiveness. But we don’t, abe that’s the illusion, this is the first thing grief takes from us.

And strangely, it is only when life becomes fragile, lije when a mother collapses into terminal illness, when a brother sits across from us with a diagnosis, and when their suddenly gone, that’s the heart waking up. The old arguments fall away like leaves from a tree I’m looking at, as I write this. . All that remains is the truth of the relationship, stripped of ego, saying “I loved you, even in the moments I didn’t show it”

From my own studies of Buddhist philosophy , conflict often comes not from hatred, attachment, fear, and misunderstood expectations. We fight because we want to be seen and want to be right. We pull away because closeness is frightening. We hold grudges because they protect us from vulnerability. And as long as the other person is alive and well, we believe the relationship can tolerate it. We assume there will be another Birthday, another Christmas, another chance.

But impermanence one of the core Buddhist teachings, tells us otherwise. Nothing is guaranteed, nothing is fixed or promised, and yet we live as if everything is.

I see it in my Psychotherapy work which echoes this too, families often spend more time protecting themselves from pain, than they do building connection. Ironically, the thing we guard ourselves against, emotional exposure , is exactly what grief throws us into when loss arrives.

Bedside Transformation

However, something profound can happen at the bedside of the dying. When someone you love is curled into the vulnerability of terminal illness, bones showing, voice fading, breath shallow, the heart can undergo a quiet transformation. This is where I personally forgot the fights, the disappointments, who didn’t apologise first, & experienced the letting go of resentments, and that’s when love entered the room.

All that remained was this human being, hurting, fragile, and deeply familiar. The were losing everything, their family, their friends, their home, their identity, everything at the same time. This process happens to our mothers whose voice shaped our earliest memories. The brother who annoyed you for years but would have protected us in a heartbeat. The sister you lost touch with but never truly stopped caring about.

From my own experience of palliative care moments, they have a spiritual quality to them. They suspend time and disarm the ego. They reveal love in its most unfiltered state. A person who once triggered your anger suddenly evokes your compassion. Their failures feel small, but their humanity feels enormous.

Now this experience makes mew wonder, why does it take moments like crisis, this bedside transformation , this final chapter, to remember the love that was always there in the first place. In my favourite movie Braveheart, William Wallace famously says, “Every man dies, Not every man truly lives.” And he speaks of trading all the days from then to now for just one chance, one chance to return, to act differently, to choose meaning over fear.

Grief confronts us with that same question. What would we trade. Which argument suddenly seems pointless. Which years of silence feel foolish. Which moments did we waste that we can never reclaim. We only ask these questions when time is running out, or already gone.

What Grief Teaches Us

If grief has a message, it is don’t wait. Don’t wait until a hospital room, or until the last breath. Don’t wait until a funeral to feel grateful for a person’s existence. You get one shot at it & you can’t go back. We spend years fighting over the small things, until grief shows us they were never the things that mattered in the first place.

“When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about” Rumi