There are moments in life that don’t feel like chapters so much as crossings – places where you are no longer who you were, but not yet who you’re becoming.  I find myself standing in one of those quiet crossings now.

My cat – only five, still so full of youth – is in palliative care.

Even writing that feels surreal.  There’s a kind of tenderness to it, but also a quiet brutality.  Loving something so deeply and knowing you are going to lose it – there is no way to make that neat.

What I’m noticing, though, is that this grief is not one clean line.  It’s textured.  Layered.  It carries echoes – of other losses, other goodbyes – old aches I thought I had already met.  It’s wide and deep and, at times, almost disorienting in its reach.  And so, instead of trying to hold it all on my own, I reached for support.  I’ve been working with a sister from my somatic training – someone who understands that grief doesn’t just live in the mind, but in the body.  In the throat that tightens.  In the chest that aches.  In the strange stillness that comes before tears arrive.

Recovery has taught me many things, but one of the most important is this – I don’t have to rush to be okay.

There was a time when I would have tried.  I would have overridden this, intellectualised it, found a way to package it into something palatable.  But that feels like a quiet kind of abandonment now.  Instead, I’m allowing this to move through me as it wants to.  I’m letting it take up space. I’m letting it break me open.

There is something unexpectedly beautiful in that, too.

Grief, when I stop resisting it, becomes something almost instructive.  Not in a clinical or detached way, but in a deeply human one.  It shows me the depth of my capacity to love.  It brings me into contact with what matters.  It strips away the unnecessary and asks me to stay present, even when presence aches.

And alongside the grief, there is gratitude.  Gratitude for every moment I can bask in his presence.  The quiet companionship, the familiarity of routines, the simple presence of another being sharing space with me.  It’s sharp, this kind of gratitude – it doesn’t bypass the pain; it sits right beside it.

If I’m honest, the timing feels inconvenient, at best.  I’m stepping into a counselling placement and preparing for my final exams.  From a practical, linear perspective, this couldn’t have arrived at a more complicated time.

But I don’t live solely from that place anymore.

There is another part of me – one that trusts something greater.  My Higher Power.  The natural unfolding of things.  What some might call Wu Wei – the practice of not forcing, of allowing life to move as it does.  And from that place, I can hold a different perspective: that this, too, belongs. That there is something here I am meant to meet.  That this experience will shape me – not just as a practitioner, but as a human being sitting across from others in their own pain.

Because how could it not?

To sit with grief in real time – to not bypass it, not rush it, not try to fix it – this is the work.  Not just professionally, but personally.  It’s an ongoing apprenticeship to life itself.

And that’s something I want to be clear about: qualification, for me, is not an arrival point.  It doesn’t place me above the work.  If anything, it deepens my commitment to it.  I will always be learning.  Always be refining. Always be meeting new edges within myself.

Right now, this is the edge – loving something while letting it go.  Staying open while it hurts.

Allowing my heart to break, without trying to close it back up too quickly.

There’s no neat resolution here. No polished ending.

Just a quiet, honest willingness to stay with what is – and to trust that, somehow, even this is part of the path.