Beyond Grief: What It Means to Live Fully After Loss

Most of what gets said about grief is about the beginning of it. The shock, the fog, the casseroles, the first unbearable weeks. There is far less language for what comes later, for the quieter territory on the far side of that first sorrow, when the heaviest weight begins to lift and life, almost without permission, starts to expand again.

That quieter territory was the entire subject of Beyond Grief: a Roundtable on Living Fully After Loss, a conversation Reimagine was honored to host on June 24, brought together by a group of grief and resilience leaders who found each other, fittingly, in a group text. Hosted and emceed by Blair Kaplan Venables of The Global Resilience Project, the roundtable gathered Nina Rodriguez of Grief and Light, Kera Sanchez of Get Griefy Magazine, Tara Accardo of Losses Become Gains, and Imogen Carn of Good Mourning. Five people who have built their lives and their work around loss, talking honestly about what it means to still be here, and to live.

This is what they explored.

The Both/And

The frame that anchored the entire conversation was what Blair called the both/and. "Grief isn't something you finish so you can start feeling joy again," she said. "You hold both. You can ache for what you've lost and feel genuinely alive."

This is a deceptively radical idea. So much of how our culture talks about grief assumes a finish line, a point at which a person is finally "over it" and allowed to be happy again. The roundtable rejected that premise entirely. Grief and joy are not a sequence. They are roommates. They live in the same house at the same time, and learning to let them coexist is the work.

Blair was careful to name what this is not. "It's not about moving on, or getting over it, or leaving anyone behind," she said. "It's not toxic positivity, it's honest expansion." That distinction matters, because the space these speakers occupy is easy to misread. Talking about growth after loss is not the same as putting a bow on it.

Grief Lives in the Body

One of the most striking threads of the conversation was how physical grief actually is, something few of the speakers were prepared for.

Nina Rodriguez described the day her grief turned bodily. Walking down the hallway of her grandmother's home, where her brother had died, she felt a tightness in her chest so severe she wondered if she was having a heart attack. Once she calmed down, she did what many of us do. She went to Google. "Can grief kill you," she typed, and discovered Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, sometimes called broken heart syndrome, along with the long list of physical symptoms that grief can produce. That search, she said, eventually became the Grief and Light podcast and everything she does today.

Imogen Carn picked up the same thread from the angle of the nervous system. After her mother's death, she lived for years in a chronic state of fight or flight without understanding what was happening to her. "Oftentimes, when we've been through a traumatic experience like a loss, our body gets stuck in that sympathetic state," she explained. The cost was physical: disrupted sleep, a weakened immune system, rashes, even eye twitches. What finally helped was not more talk therapy, but somatic work, breathwork, learning to return her body to a state of rest. "That was life-changing for me," she said, "and helped me re-engage with life again."

For an organization built around both psychological research and embodied practice, this was a powerful reminder: grief is not only an emotional event. It is something the body carries, and sometimes the body is where healing has to begin.

Choosing Joy Is a Practice, Not a Feeling

If there was a single most practical takeaway from the roundtable, it was that joy after loss is often a deliberate act rather than a spontaneous one.

Kera Sanchez offered the conversation's most memorable concept. She described what she calls dopamine grieving, modeled on the idea of dopamine dressing, where you choose an outfit specifically to lift your mood. "I had to curate and pick out activities, friend groups, social circles, little habits and rituals," she said. "All of those things were something that I intentionally had to choose and pick out, much like a wardrobe, and that is what I put on every day." Some days it was as hard as putting on a full face of makeup when you don't want to. But the choosing itself, she found, was the thing that helped.

Nina added a gentler companion idea, borrowing a phrase her brother used: the LLPs, life's little pleasures. Re-engaging with life, she stressed, happens at its own pace. "So many people will try to push you forward and try to get you out of your grief," she said. "You do it on your own timing, and your timing is not everybody else's timing." Tara Accardo described the same instinct as looking for the glimmers, the small sparks of curiosity and joy that slowly start to reappear.

Post-Traumatic Growth, Without the Polish

The conversation's most honest moments came when the speakers refused to make post-traumatic growth sound pretty.

Imogen, asked what growth looks like in real, non-polished terms, did not reach for a silver lining. "Post-traumatic growth, for me, has been really ugly. It's been really lonely. It's been really challenging," she said. She spoke of losing friendships, of wanting to retreat to who she used to be, of going through what she called the dark night of the soul, "getting ripped to shreds, coming out the other side going, who the hell am I now?" The growth was real. So was the cost. What she landed on was not triumph but a kind of homecoming: "I feel like I've come home to myself."

For several of the speakers, growth showed up as a change in what they could tolerate. Kera described losing patience for small talk and craving conversations with real depth. Tara spoke about releasing the expectation that everyone in her life could understand her loss, and finding instead the handful of people who could sit with her in it without needing to say a word. "It cannot be understated how important that is," she said.

Staying Connected While Moving Forward

A recurring question was how you stay close to the person you lost while still continuing to grow and change. The answers were tender and varied: a parent's signature tattooed on a forearm, a wedding anniversary inked on the skin, sessions with a trusted medium, numbers that show up at exactly the right moment.

Nina offered the framework of continued bonds, the idea that "death can end a life, but not necessarily a relationship." Learning that, she said, changed everything. "I get to still be his sister." Kera described her late mother sending her the number six, including the coat-check ticket stamped 66 the night the group first met in person. "I firmly believe that my mom is co-creating with me," she said.

Tara, characteristically, held the both/and even here. The signs and the dreams are beautiful, she said, and they are not a consolation prize. "It doesn't make up for them not being here." Both things, again, are true.

A Word of Care

What made this roundtable trustworthy was its refusal to oversell. Near the end, Imogen offered a caution that every grieving person deserves to hear. The speakers were not suggesting anyone must find meaning, or growth, or a silver lining in their loss. "Grief is so individual," she said. "Take from this conversation whatever little bits are going to help you along your journey, and please don't sit here comparing yourself to us."

Nina echoed it with a reminder that the people on screen were years into their grief, and that the person in early, raw grief is not the person having this conversation. "We don't move on from," she said. "We move forward with."

That is, in the end, what living fully after loss seems to mean. Not leaving anyone behind. Not closing the book. Just letting the shelf fill back up around it, and choosing, day by day, to be an active participant in this one wild and precious life.

Watch the full recording of Beyond Grief: a Roundtable on Living Fully After Loss below.

Reimagine is a nonprofit catalyzing a community of people who transform life's biggest challenges into purpose, creativity, and growth. This roundtable was created and hosted by Reimagine collaborators. If there's a conversation you don't see represented here, you can host your own event on the Reimagine platform. To explore Reimagine's free guided pathway through grief and loss, join the beta of Reimagine Grief and Loss. For upcoming events including Room for Grief, visit letsreimagine.org.