Welcome to the grief room.
A place where nothing needs to be fixed.
And nothing you love needs to be left behind.
I am Dr.
Devina Wadhwa.
I'm a psychiatrist,
And I'm also someone who knows what it is like to lose someone you love.
And I created this podcast because I think grief needs a different kind of space.
Not a space where we are immediately asked how we're coping.
Not a space where someone tells us everything happens for a reason.
And not a space where we are quietly expected to be doing better by now.
Just a rube.
Somewhere we can sit with what happened.
I spend much of my professional life sitting with people during some of the most difficult moments of their lives.
As a psychiatrist,
I've learned the language of symptoms and diagnoses.
I've learned about trauma.
About the nervous system,
About depression and anxiety.
I've learned how the mind responds when something happens that changes the shape of a life.
But grief taught me something that textbooks could not.
Because when someone you love dies,
Knowing about grief and living inside grief are two very different things.
When my dad died,
There was a before and there was an after.
And somehow life continued in between.
The email still arrived.
People still needed things.
There were appointments,
Groceries,
Work.
People laughed.
The world remained astonishingly ordinary.
And I remember thinking,
How can everything still be happening?
Doesn't everybody know?
Eventually,
I returned to my work.
I sat across from patients again.
I listened.
I asked questions.
I did all of the things I had been trained to do.
But I wasn't quite the same person sitting in that chair anymore.
Grief had changed the way I understood suffering.
And maybe even the way I understood healing.
Because I began to realize that healing doesn't always mean making pain disappear.
Sometimes healing means learning how to carry something that cannot be changed.
That is what I want to explore here.
The parts of our grief we don't always talk about.
The moment a song catches you completely off guard.
The strange loneliness when everyone else seems to have moved on.
The anger.
The guilt.
The things you wish you had said.
The things you wish you hadn't.
What grief does to the body.
What happens when you have to go back to work while part of you is somewhere else entirely.
And eventually what it means to laugh again,
To travel,
To love,
To want things,
To build a life that still has beauty in it without feeling as though that beauty betrays the person who isn't there to see it.
Some episodes will draw from psychiatry.
And what we understand about the grieving brain and the nervous system.
Some will draw from mindfulness,
Some will be personal.
And sometimes I'll simply sit with a question that doesn't have a clean answer.
Because grief doesn't always need an answer.
Sometimes it needs somewhere to go.
And that is why I called this podcast,
The Grief Room.
I don't think we need to live in this room.
There is an entire life outside of it.
But I think every once in a while,
We need somewhere we're allowed to enter.
Somewhere we can say,
I still miss them.
This still hurts.
I thought I would be further along by now.
Or I am actually okay and I feel guilty about that.
All of it belongs here.
So wherever you are listening,
Maybe you are grieving someone who died recently.
Maybe it's been 20 years.
Maybe you are supporting someone you love.
Maybe you are a clinician who spends your days sitting beside other people's losses.
Or maybe grief has simply changed your life in a way you're still trying to understand.
You are welcome here.
There is no timeline you need to meet before entering.
There is nothing you need to prove.
And there is no correct way to grief.
In the episode ahead,
We will talk about grief as it actually appears in life.
Messy.
Unexpected sometimes.
Sometimes devastating.
Sometimes strangely beautiful.
And often all of those things at once.
Thank you for coming into this room with me.
Stay for as long as you need.
And when you are ready,
You can leave the room.
The love comes with you.
