Grief is an initiation no one asks for—but it finds us all eventually. And when it does, it changes everything.
Eron Vito Mazza
When we think of spiritual rites, we often picture the joyful or solemn ceremonies that mark the great turning points of life: a baptism, a bar mitzvah, a wedding, a child’s first steps into community. These are the rituals we prepare for, celebrate, and wrap in song and story.
But there’s another rite—one we never plan for, one we’re rarely ready to receive. It’s the rite of loss.
The initiation of grief.
Sorrow comes quietly, sometimes suddenly. It arrives like a storm in the middle of a sunny day, and leaves our lives unrecognizable in its wake. It doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t wait until we’re ready. And yet, it takes us across a threshold we cannot ignore.
Grief doesn’t just take the ones we love—it rearranges the very architecture of our lives. It takes the shape of an empty chair at dinner. A hospital room that will never again hold laughter. The silence where a voice once lived. It leaves behind only memories and the aching space where love used to reach.
And in the midst of that space, we’re left asking: Who am I now that they’re gone?
Grief is a liminal realm—one foot in the world we knew, and one in the world that’s forming around our pain. It is the road between chapters, the fog between lives. Whether that next chapter is filled with light or shadow often depends on how gently we hold ourselves as we walk through it.
When I lost my dad unexpectedly a few years ago, I wandered the streets of my city like a ghost. Places I had passed a thousand times felt unfamiliar—alien. The whole world looked different without him in it. And oddly, I didn’t cry right away. (Though believe me, the tears came later).
Looking back, I understand now that his death lifted a weight I didn’t know I was carrying. The worry, the caretaking, the unanswered questions—I was no longer holding them. The grief didn’t just break me. It remade me. The tears I shed weren’t just sorrow—they were a kind of baptism. A crossing over from one life into another. One where his absence became part of my story… and strangely, part of my strength.
His loss deepened my path.
It pulled me closer to the ancestors.
It opened a door to the underworld I hadn’t known I was ready to walk through. If you are grieving right now, hear this:
You are not broken.
You are being remade.
Whatever shape your grief takes—rage, silence, weeping, numbness—it is not a failure. It is a sacred passage.
Grief is not the absence of love.
It is love.
It is the thread that ties us to those we’ve lost, and the quiet magic that helps us carry them forward.
To remember someone—to speak their name, to light a candle, to smile at a memory—that is a spell.
That is devotion.
That is power.
Sometimes the gods don’t send us blessings.
Sometimes, they send us wounds.
But even wounds can open us.
Even wounds can be holy.
We are all part of this strange, quiet priesthood—those who’ve known loss and kept loving anyway.
Those who’ve been baptized not with water, but with tears.
Grief is sacred.
And so are you.
Eron Vito Mazza is the author of The Living Lenormand, and is the host of the podcast The Witching hour with Eron Mazza.
