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grief that doesn't fit anywhere else

You might not have a word for what you're carrying. That's not a problem to fix — it's where we begin.

you might be here because

  • There's a heaviness in your chest that isn't quite sadness and isn't quite anxiety. It just sits there.
  • You're exhausted in a way that sleep doesn't fix. Not tired from doing too much — tired from carrying something you can't put down.
  • Your body is in pain, and somewhere beneath the medical explanations, you sense there's something else. Something no one is asking you about.
  • You lost something that wasn't a person — a pregnancy, a relationship, a future, a version of yourself — and nobody treats it as a loss.
  • You've been told to move on, and you can't. Not because you're stuck. Because the loss is ongoing.
See if you recognise yourself here
What grief is

Grief is bigger than death.
It always has been.

We've been taught that grief belongs to bereavement. But grief is the body's honest response to any significant loss — and loss takes more forms than we've been given language for.

The loss of health. The loss of a future you were promised. The quiet, daily loss that comes with living in a body that is in pain. The accumulated losses that no one asks about because they don't look like bereavement.

What happens here

A practice built on four movements

One

Naming

Finding precise language for imprecise suffering. The language that, once spoken, changes how grief feels in the body.

Two

Holding

Being present with grief without rushing to resolve it. Learning to carry what you carry and, discovering new ways to carry it.

Three

Shaping

Giving grief a form that belongs to you — through story, through writing, through drawing, through the body. Your own version of story.

Four

Witnessing

Some grief simply needs to be seen. Not interpreted, not reframed. Just witnessed — by someone who won't flinch.

Who comes here

People living with chronic illness — endometriosis, autoimmune conditions, chronic pain — who have carried grief that no one in their medical care ever made space for.

People whose losses don't have death certificates. Relationships that eroded. Futures that became impossible. Selves that were shed. The body you had before the diagnosis.

Caregivers who grieve quietly alongside the person they care for. Parents carrying the weight of a child's suffering. Children — and the adults who love and work with them — navigating loss in bodies that feel it long before they have the words.

Anyone who searched for something one night because the weight was too much to hold alone.

I built The Tending because I spent twenty years looking for a space like this and couldn't find one. A space that understood that grief isn't always about death. That the body grieves. That chronic pain is a form of ongoing loss.

Kshema, founder
When you're ready

If something here resonated

You don't need to have it figured out. You don't need to know if what you're carrying counts as grief. That's part of what we do here — find the shape of it, together.

Let's have a conversation
Grief Practice

Understanding grief — on its own terms

A growing space for anyone trying to understand what they're carrying. Not clinical. Not prescriptive. Just honest.

is this you

  • There's a heaviness in your chest that isn't quite sadness and isn't quite anxiety. It just sits there.
  • You're exhausted in a way that sleep doesn't fix. Not tired from doing too much — tired from carrying something you can't put down.
  • Your body is in pain, and somewhere beneath the medical explanations, you sense there's something else. Something no one is asking you about.
  • You're not depressed, exactly. But you're not okay either. The word for what you're feeling doesn't seem to exist.
  • You feel numb. Not at peace — just empty. Like something has been turned down inside you and you can't find the dial.
  • You feel guilty for not being okay. Or guilty for being okay on a day when you think you shouldn't be.
  • You've lost interest in things you used to love, and you can't tell if that's a phase or something deeper.
  • You feel like you're watching your own life from a slight distance. Present, but not quite inside it.
  • You were diagnosed with something chronic, and alongside the treatment plans came a sadness that no one made room for.
  • You lost something that wasn't a person — a pregnancy, a relationship, a future, a sense of safety, a version of yourself — and nobody treats it as a loss.
  • Your body changed — from illness, from surgery, from years of pain — and you're mourning the body you had, even as you live in the one you have now.
  • Someone told you to move on, to stay positive, to be grateful for what you have. And you couldn't. Not because you're ungrateful — because the loss is still here.
  • You're grieving a future that isn't going to happen — a body that won't cooperate, a life that took a different shape than the one you planned.
  • You grieve alone because the people around you don't see your loss as a loss. It doesn't fit the scripts they know.
  • You feel like a burden when you bring it up. So you've stopped bringing it up. And the silence has become its own kind of weight.
  • You've been carrying something heavy and you're not sure it counts as grief — because nobody died.
  • You searched for something tonight because the weight was too much to hold alone. And you're not entirely sure what you were looking for.

If even one of these made you pause — you're in the right place. You don't need to have the words yet.

Questions people carry

Things you might have searched for at 2am

Yes. Grief is the response to any significant loss — a diagnosis, a relationship, a future, a version of yourself, a sense of safety. You don't need a death certificate for your pain to be real. If you feel it, it's grief.

Because some losses don't end. Chronic illness, chronic pain, the absence of someone who's still alive but gone from your life — these are ongoing losses. You're not stuck. You're living with something that recurs, and it makes sense that the grief does too.

It almost always does. Tightness in the chest. Exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix. Pain that moves around. A heaviness that isn't quite sadness but isn't nothing. The body holds what the mind hasn't been able to put into words yet. That's not a metaphor — it's how grief works.

Because most people have a narrow idea of what grief looks like. They expect tears at a funeral, not the quiet devastation of a diagnosis. They understand mourning a person, not mourning a future. Your grief isn't less real because it doesn't match what people expect. It just needs a different kind of witness.

More than normal — it's one of the most common and least spoken-about forms of grief. When your body changes because of illness, injury, surgery, or chronic pain, you lose something real. The body you had. The things it could do. The ease you used to move with. That deserves to be grieved, not minimised.

Because most therapeutic approaches treat grief as a symptom of something else — anxiety, depression, adjustment disorder. They address the distress but not the loss underneath. A grief practice is different. It makes the loss itself the subject, and gives it the time and the language it needs.

The honest answer: not by coping with it, but by tending to it. Chronic illness grief isn't a wave that passes — it's weather you learn to live in. That doesn't mean accepting defeat. It means learning to grieve what is lost without abandoning what remains. It means finding company that doesn't demand you pretend.

Grief counselling typically works within clinical frameworks — structured sessions aimed at processing loss and reducing symptoms. A grief practice is something broader and slower. It's a space where grief is not a problem to be solved but an experience to be held, named, and shaped. It draws on narrative practices, embodied awareness, and the belief that you are the expert of your own grief. There's no intake form, no diagnosis, no timeline.

That's one of the most honest places to begin. Not knowing is not a barrier — it's the starting point. Part of this work is helping you find the shape and the name for what you're carrying. You don't need to arrive with a label. You just need to arrive.

Writing on grief

Articles and longer reads

These are growing. Some are being written; others are already alive. Come back.

Chronic illness

Your body changed. You're allowed to mourn what it was.

Grief practice

Grief is not a stage. It's a practice.

Unnamed loss

Ambiguous loss: when the thing you're grieving didn't die

Body

Why the body is grief's first language

India

Grief in India: the silences we carry

Little people

When "difficult child" was actually a child in pain

Something here resonated? We'd like to hear from you.

Start a conversation
Engagements

The practice takes different shapes

The first step

Not sure which format fits?

Start with a 15-minute conversation. No intake form, no pressure to explain yourself before we've spoken. Just a beginning.

Let's talk
About

The practice and
the person.

Kshema

I come to this work not as a clinician who added grief to an intake form, but as someone whose body has been a site of ongoing loss for over two decades.

Living with endometriosis and chronic pain has taught me things about grief that no training could — how it recurs, how it lives in the body, how it demands its own pace. I have been a patient. I am a patient. That is not incidental to this work. It is the work.

How the practice began

I didn't start with grief. I started with healing. For years, the project was to get better — to manage the pain, to find the right doctors, to push through, to keep going.

And then, somewhere in the long arc of that effort, I became aware of something underneath the healing: grief. Not as the opposite of getting better, but as part of it. I realised that healing itself is grieving. Every treatment that works means accepting that you needed it. Every adaptation means letting go of something you could do before. Every good day carries the shadow of knowing it might not last.

That awareness changed everything. I stopped trying to get past the grief and started learning to hold it. And then I noticed that holding grief has forms of its own — seasons when it needed to be carried silently, seasons when it needed to be spoken, seasons when it could only move through the body. Seasons when it needed art, or writing, or the company of someone who didn't need me to explain.

I transitioned through these forms. I'm still transitioning. That's the practice.

Training and background

Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology (Clinical Training)

Where language is produced, where it breaks down, and what happens when someone literally cannot form the words for what they feel. In grief work, this matters more than people realise. So much suffering goes unnamed not because people don't feel it, but because the available language is too coarse.

Development Studies (Social Justice Frameworks)

To understand grief not as an individual pathology but as something shaped by systems — caste, class, gender, medical access, the specific economies of care globally, the particular silences that govern how women & men, young & old, married or widowed, disabled and neurospicy are expected to process pain. Grief is personal. It is also structural. This space holds both.

Narrative Practices (12 months Diploma)

The methodological spine of the work. Narrative practice treats the person as the expert of their own life. It sees the problem as the problem — not the person as the problem. In grief work specifically, it offers something most clinical approaches don't: the insistence that relationships survive death, that grief is a story still being written, that the person grieving is the authority on their own loss.

Knowledge-based events

For over six years, I have organised spaces where ideas, creative expression, and human connection meet. This is not peripheral to a grief practice — it is the practice. The holding circles, writing workshops, and community spaces I build are all extensions of this work.

These are not separate qualifications. They are a single, coherent practice.

What The Tending believes

Grief is a heavy word. The loss of a partner. The loss of a future you were promised. The quiet, daily loss that comes with living in a body that is in pain. All of this is grief.

Grief lives in the body. Exhaustion. Tightness in the chest. The body holds what the mind hasn't been able to put into words yet.

Grief is not a problem to be solved. It's a natural response to loss. We learn to hold it, witness it.

Grief is structural, not only personal. The person grieving their changed body is also grieving inside systems that made that body disposable. Disability justice, chronic illness advocacy, and an understanding of how power shapes who gets to grieve — these are foundational, not footnotes.

Tending doesn't end. This is not a transit state with an exit. It is a practice you return to — ongoing, unhurried, at your pace.

I built this because I spent twenty years looking for a space like this and couldn't find one.

If something here resonated — I'd like to hear from you.
Start a conversation
For practitioners

Grief is present in almost every room a practitioner is in

These workshops are for practitioners who want to recognise it when it arrives, hold it without rushing to fix it, and know when it needs a dedicated space.

What The Tending is

The Tending is an independent grief practice. It is a dedicated space for people living with grief that doesn't fit conventional frameworks: grief that recurs, that has no certificate, that lives in the body before it has language.

The practice is built on four movements: Naming, Holding, Shaping, and Witnessing.

How practitioners intersect with this work

Referrals. When grief is present alongside but distinct from the primary clinical concern. When someone has completed clinical work but the grief hasn't resolved. When a person needs a grief-specific space that isn't therapy.

Co-facilitation. Grief-informed workshops, group spaces, or training days designed and held together with therapists, social workers, body-based practitioners, or educators.

Practitioner training. Workshops on grief-informed practice for therapists, counsellors, teachers, physiotherapists, and others working with people who carry grief.

Co-learning. Practitioners engaging in the space of grief are welcome to write in if they are interested in exploring frameworks of practice.

About the practitioner

I'm Kshema — the founder and practitioner behind The Tending. My work sits at an intersection of Speech-Language Pathology, Development Studies, and Narrative Practices. I've lived with endometriosis and chronic pain for over two decades. That lived experience is not a credential gap, it is the credential.

I have been organising knowledge-based events at the intersections of knowledge, art, and people for years. The holding circles and workshops I build are direct extensions of that practice.

Workshop offerings

Workshop format, structure and depth are shaped through a discovery conversation.

For: Therapists, counsellors, social workers, teachers

Grief-Informed Practice

Grief doesn't always look like grief. It can look like resistance, numbness, or a person who keeps returning to the same story without moving. This workshop covers what grief is beyond bereavement — ambiguous loss, disenfranchised grief, chronic illness grief — and builds the language and presence to hold it without pathologising it or rushing it toward resolution.

For: Somatic therapists, yoga teachers, movement practitioners, physiotherapists, occupational therapists

The Body in Grief Work

Grief is in the body before it has words. Body-based practitioners often meet it first — in the exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix, the pain without clean explanation, the body that has changed beyond what the person expected. This workshop explores what grief does somatically, how to work with it without pathologising it, and how creating safety in the body is prerequisite to everything else.

For: Practitioners curious about narrative practice applied to grief — prior narrative training not required

Narrative Approaches to Grief

Most grief frameworks ask people to let go. Narrative practice asks something different: not goodbye, but hullo again. This workshop introduces re-membering conversations, continuing bonds, and meaning reconstruction — not as theory but as practical orientations that change the questions you ask. What does it mean to treat the relationship with what was lost as ongoing?

For: Physiotherapists, occupational therapists, GPs, nurses, mental health practitioners, allied health professionals

Chronic Illness and Grief for Practitioners

Chronic illness carries grief that doesn't resolve: the grief of a changed body, a narrowed future, a self others no longer recognise. This grief has no death certificate and rarely gets named in a clinical encounter. This workshop draws on ambiguous loss theory, disenfranchised grief, and disability justice to help practitioners see the grief dimension of chronic illness work — and to hold it alongside, not instead of, the clinical care.

For: Teachers, speech therapists, school counsellors, and all professionals who work with children

Grief in Little People

Little people grieve — but rarely in ways adults recognise as grief. It can look like withdrawal, dysregulation, aggression, selective mutism, or a sudden change in how a child uses language. This workshop is for practitioners who are already in the room with grieving children — and who want to see it clearly, name it carefully, and hold it without rushing to fix it. We look at how grief shows up in the body and behaviour of little people, how to create space for it without language-heavy approaches, and how to support the adults around them to hold it too.

If grief is in your work more often than it's named

Let's talk through what collaboration might look like.

Start a conversation
Let's talk

A 15-minute conversation.

You don't need to explain yourself before we've spoken. You don't need to know if what you're carrying counts as grief. Just tell us a little about where you are right now — and we'll take it from there.

A few gentle questions — take your time.

Choose what feels closest — or leave it open.

No wrong answers. No right ones either.

Almost there. How do we reach you?

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Thank you.

Kshema will write back. Personally, unhurriedly, when she's read what you've shared.

In the meantime — you've done enough for today.