By Rebecca Hensler, Founder of Grief Beyond Belief

For a while you just feel broken. Like grief just cracked you open. Maybe it happened all at once, like an explosion that blasted you from whole to shrapnel in one moment. Or maybe it started with a hairline fracture that spread until you split.

You feel like you should put yourself back together. Some days you find a way to glue the pieces to each other long enough to do what needs doing. But it doesn’t hold. And you may feel like you really need to fix yourself, before your fractured state becomes permanent. You worry that if you stay broken long enough you will lose pieces of yourself.

I’m not going to lie to you. Maybe there are parts of yourself that you will lose to grief. But maybe there are parts you will find to replace them or grow to fill in the spaces.

So don’t rush yourself to become whole again. Give yourself permission to stay broken for a while. And don’t let anyone else tell you where the pieces go when you put yourself back together.

“Broken” is a rough draft that will (hopefully) be published in a collection of Rebecca Hensler’s humanist grief meditations. The working title is Be Gentle With Yourself: 100 Humanist Meditations on Grief, and she welcomes your input and comments as this project takes shape.