08/30/2026
It is National Grief Awareness Day.
Today, I’m thinking about the words people have entrusted to me in grief.
One griever said:
“When people stop saying their name, it feels like they disappear all over again.”
I’ve heard grief expressed in countless ways, but that sentence has stayed with me.
Grief is not only sadness. It can be longing, disorientation, anger, relief, love, exhaustion, memory, identity, loneliness, laughter, and the strange work of learning how to live in a world that has changed.
And grievers do not necessarily need us to find the right words or make their pain better.
Sometimes they need us to say the name.
To remember.
To ask about the person who died.
To listen to the story again.
To make room for both sorrow and joy.
To understand that continuing to grieve does not mean someone is failing to move forward.
National Grief Awareness Day is an opportunity to make grief a little less lonely—not by prescribing how someone should navigate it, but by becoming more willing to accompany them in it. That is the reason I formed Invictus by Genna and, by extension, The Compassionate Compass Grief Support Community.Â
Presence over fixing.
Acknowledgment over avoidance.
Permission for grief to be named.
To everyone carrying someone or something they have lost: your grief does not need to look like anyone else’s to be worthy of space.
— Genna Reeves, Ph.D.
Invictus | Grief Education & Peer Grief Support
Invictus by Genna Reeves, Ph.D. | Grief & Loss Services