Some grief doesn’t lift. It settles in, and asks to be carried.
Today is September 11th.
Twenty-five years on, and the ache still surfaces — for people who watched it happen, and for people who weren’t yet born when it did. That’s the strange, stubborn thing about collective grief: it doesn’t behave like the grief we’re taught to expect. It doesn’t shrink neatly on a schedule. It doesn’t resolve because a certain number of years have passed. It just stays, quietly, and rises up when we least expect it.
We tend to treat that as a problem. As if we’re doing grief wrong when it doesn’t fade. But I’ve come to believe the opposite — that grief like this staying with us isn’t a malfunction. It might be exactly what it’s meant to do.
What is collective grief?
Collective grief is the sorrow a whole community — or a whole country — carries together over a shared loss. It isn’t only for the people who lost someone directly. The parade of years since 2001 has been long enough that a new generation has inherited the ache without living the day. You can grieve something you didn’t personally experience. You can feel the weight of a loss that belongs to all of us.
If you were alive that morning, you remember where you stood. What you were holding. The strange, suspended quiet of the days after. And if you weren’t, you’ve likely still inherited some of it — the sense that something in the world cracked and never quite went back together.
That’s collective grief. Not one person’s wound, but a shared one, handed down.
Why doesn’t 9/11 grief go away?
Because it was never the kind of loss that closes.
We’re used to a certain story about grief — that it moves in stages, that you work through it, that one day you reach the other side. But the people closest to the losses of that day will tell you plainly: it doesn’t get easier in the way that story promises. You don’t move on from it. You move with it.
And I don’t think that’s failure. I think the big, collective losses are meant to be carried — and to be shared, so that no one carries them alone. The grief doesn’t leave because the love and the loss underneath it don’t leave either. Expecting it to vanish is asking the wrong thing of it.
What do you do with grief that has no anniversary?
This is where it gets personal, because 9/11 is not the only grief most of us are carrying.
There are the losses with no date on the calendar. The person who’s gone. The life that didn’t happen. The version of yourself you had to leave behind. The friendship that faded, the diagnosis, the door that closed. These don’t get a moment of national silence. No one gathers to read their names. And yet they live in us with the same stubborn permanence.
Grief with no anniversary is easy to step around. We get good at it — busy, capable, moving. But stepping around a thing is not the same as tending it. What I’ve found, over and over, is that these quieter losses don’t resolve when we avoid them. They soften, slowly, only when we let ourselves actually feel them.
A day like today has a way of loosening all of it at once. The public grief cracks open the private grief. That’s not a coincidence, and it’s not something to brace against. It’s an invitation.
How do we heal collective grief together?
Ever since I began processing my own grief around this — and around other major losses — I’ve been wondering how in the world we are ever going to heal this, collectively. It’s so big.
I’ve talked it over with colleagues, with professionals in consciousness work and healing. Nothing ever quite emerged. But I never gave up. I knew there had to be something — some way — to ease this collective suffering.
So when the opportunity fell into my lap, I knew I had to build something myself.
That’s the Tending Room. Not a place to fix grief — grief isn’t a problem to solve — but a place to give it somewhere to be. A quiet room to sit with what we carry, without being rushed or reassured out of it.
I wanted you to know about it. Today. Because you, or someone you love, may need it — whether that’s now, or a week from now, or whenever the burden feels too hard to carry alone. That’s why I made it. I use it often myself, and I’ll be using it again today. And if a time comes when you’d like some relief, it will be here for you.
Here’s where you can learn more, when you’re ready.
Be gentle with yourself today. And with the people around you, who may be carrying more than they’re showing.
With you in it,
Nancy