PERMISSION ISN’T A common word in discussions about grief, but it’s what’s been missing. Giving yourself permission to grieve is the beginning of the journey: permission to know that you have loved and cherished someone’s life deeply and will continue to.

There comes a time when you have no choice. Permission to grieve becomes required.

You never understand just how useless you are as an individual, how mortal, how humane and powerless you are until you know that someone you love is dying, and there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop it from happening. The anticipation of a day you would do anything to prevent, but can’t; it isn’t just an emotional pain, it is all encompassing. This feeling is felt in your headaches, insomnia, body pains, stomachaches, loss of appetite, or an appetite for everything. I lost over twenty-five pounds the year before my mom died, and I didn’t notice it, I just started wearing more belts. You are forced to exist in this tenuous space between life and death, and there is often an ominous undertone to everything. I remember what I call “the beginning” of my mom’s death well, the moment when I knew that her life would one day end, that it was more than possible, it was a guarantee. It was an idea that I could never have mentally or emotionally fathomed, molded into a real thought before this time, though I had cared for her many years through her illness—but now it was happening.

“Can you feel that?” the doctor asked.

“Yes,” she admitted. And just like that, my grief journey began.

It was a muggy afternoon in June, and I was supposed to be at college enjoying Senior Week festivities in advance of my graduation. Instead, I found myself standing in a corner furiously taking notes in a doctor’s office in Fishkill, New York, with my mother, father, and godmother. Examination rooms are not made for that many additional guests, but I was determined at twenty-two to be the fourth adult in the room because I needed to know with certainty what exactly was wrong with my mother. She was lying faceup on the examination table wearing one of those ridiculous paper shirts. An orthopedic doctor, a family friend, had recently discovered cancer in her bones, but now this oncologist was touching her breasts. I knew just enough about cancer to know this was not good. My palms started to sweat. He gently lifted my mother’s hand and placed it on her left breast and asked, “Can you feel that?”, and she replied, “Yes.” The floor opened up beneath my feet. The stability I had previously taken for granted was replaced by the pain that arrives when you learn that someone you love is going to die. It was a deep sense of foreboding, a bodily knowledge of things to come that you would do just about anything to avoid. I didn’t have an understanding of what grief was or how it felt. After he removed her hand from her breast, my deepest fears were confirmed. He patiently explained that my mother had breast cancer that had already migrated to her bones. A death sentence. At the time, it felt foolish and, frankly, immature of me to be so upset about her future death while she was still with us, so I didn’t give myself permission to grieve. I gave myself permission to step up and soldier on.

My mother had been sick with multiple sclerosis since I was thirteen. My sister has bipolar disorder. I had no idea what it might look like to give myself permission to be the needy one, permission to make a scene, permission to acknowledge just how quickly those four words, “Can you feel that?” broke my heart. I knew if cancer was in her bones that started in her breast, her diagnosis was stage 4: treatable but not curable. She was going to die soon. Instead of giving myself permission to feel anything, I shut my feelings off, and I stepped up to help my mom and dad like everyone expected me to.

After death isn’t the only time to grieve. The period before death can be filled with anguish and all sorts of complicated feelings, and the only thing that makes grief—whether before or after death—even a tiny bit easier is giving yourself permission to grieve on your terms. Whether it arrives before death or a decade later, when you hold your newborn son in your arms and all you can see is your dead father’s face, give yourself permission to feel grief, to experience the fullness of it, to let it break your heart or to let it make you smile. Grief is not solely limited to wailing, devastation, and pain. Grief can also be a laugh, a memory you share with a loved one recalling something your person said, or a joke about the time that your mom saved one friend’s hair after another friend accidentally dyed it orange (true story, my mom did things like that even for my friends). Living with loss requires you to give yourself permission to grieve however you want to for the rest of your life…because grief is love, and both love and grief live on.

Permission to know it is okay to grieve is the freedom that we all need. Permission to remove, or at least reduce, any sense that “you’ve been too sad for too long,” that you might not be “grieving right,” or that you “aren’t grieving often enough.” Grief is deeply personal; you are the sole authority on how it should be done, and only you can grant yourself permission to experience grief. And you must make a decision to walk this path that your soul hungers to express. On your grief journey, begin by granting yourself consent to do it however you need to, to be whoever you need to be, to feel whatever you might feel. It will make living with loss easier, more bearable, and less burdensome.

The earlier that you start to give yourself permission to grieve, the better. Grief is never easy, but you can make it a little bit lighter.

If you are helping to care for your loved one or if you serve as a primary caretaker, there is a load of grief you must confront every day. There’s not a place you can hide from it; it’s in front of you. There’s a constant reminder of their death sitting right in the task at hand that you must do for them. Often with this role come guilt and resentment. Guilt anytime you might complain about how challenging life is as a caretaker, because at least they are still here. Resentment toward anyone who doesn’t have to balance the challenges that come with caretaking, with preparing for their death, all while managing the expectations of your “normal life.” There is no bereavement policy that accounts for the time before death. As you mourn the inevitable, life goes on. Whether you are sitting with them in hospice care or at home, you’re holding their hand in support; but there’s also the burden of a broken heart that you’re forced to carry quietly and the unending anxiety about a future without them. When is this thing going to actually happen? What is it going to be like to watch my person die? How do I ensure that when she does die, I have no regrets? What do I want to make sure I ask her or try to learn from her before it happens? What is going to happen to me when she’s gone? How do I ensure that I don’t lose my mind in the midst of all of this? So many questions without perfect answers, and generally very little time or support to tend to them. And in the absence of giving yourself permission to feel this burden that grief causes, you suffer silently.

It was often that my heart felt like it might explode out of my chest. It was not just a one-time occurrence. I was in a state of continuous free fall. My mind raced incessantly with questions after my mom’s cancer diagnosis, and I just wanted it to stop, to be able to turn off what was happening to her and to me. What I truly wanted to do was stop time. I knew with each passing day, I was one day closer to losing my mother. I was trying to hold on to her like a child attempting to hold on to sand with fists clenched, grasping tight. What I would have loved to do was hold her with a cupped, nearly open palm, the way you might hold water, in recognition of the softness, the fluidity that love and death require. I didn’t feel stable enough, secure enough, safe enough to let her go. I couldn’t see a life lived without her. I couldn’t envision a world in which she ceased to exist, but unfortunately, I was in a position where I’d have to anticipate it.

As her caretaker, I would have been described as high functioning. It’s a strength of many caretakers, but oftentimes we’re the folks who need to be most conscious about care. While my mom was dying, as I mentioned, I was working at a fancy job on Wall Street, managing a breast cancer charity in her honor, and frequenting all the cool bars in the West Village. Generally, I looked and behaved like a flippant twenty-something New Yorker. But I was a fucking mess. My anxiety was out of control. I started requiring medication to get through the day. I quickly outgrew the standard sleeping pills—Ambien and Lunesta—and graduated to a more complex, and unbeknownst to me, addictive, regimen of temazepam and Xanax to attempt to get some sleep. Even medicated, most nights I was lucky to get three or four hours of sleep. I was a wreck. I knew my mother was dying, and there was nothing I could do about it. The closer we got to her death, the greater my anxiety.