I began to see grief everywhere.

A diagnosis started it, though I didn’t know, exactly, what I was seeing. I had no words for the gnawing inside my gut, the tightness beneath my sternum, the exhales that were just that much heavier. Grief was everywhere, but nameless. It became larger and louder until I could sense it, name it, be with it, speak about it. Only then did I begin to smile – really smile – again.

Grief will require it be Seen.

Reflecting on her piece “Are You Happy?” (Nonfiction, Spring/Summer 2025 Intima) in “Getting to Say Goodbye,” a Crossroads post from July 2025, patient advocate Holly Cantley speaks to this ability of Sight.

She reflects on her daughter’s life with neuroblastoma, on the “painful” nine-year decline that placed Cantley “in the position of the “‘unluckiest parent alive.’” To be with the hardest diagnosis, to decipher it for your child, to sit alongside her as you do: This is Grief-Sight, requiring nothing other than full presence, even to what is painful.

What if we don’t run from pain that’s inevitable? Here, there is possibility. As Cantley writes, to “make memories, savor [her] daughter’s life, and share existential talks,” the singular uniqueness of “experienc[ing] the perfect goodbye.”

This is “alchemize[d] grief,” as I write in “Diary of a Plunge Year” (Field Notes, Fall/Winter 2025-26 Intima). Grief-Sight works a form of magic: in seeing and honoring loss, there is connection to the love that lives on its other side.

Grief-Sight demands a stance of presence, one which you can see in Cantley’s piece. It could also look like [C] from “Plunge Year,” whose nephew died at two of meningitis. In the wake of [D’s] death was [C’s] bodily and emotional accounting: he moved, breathed, felt, wrote, cried, slowed. He paid me a visit, and alongside him I learned to do the same.

Grief-Sight alchemizes. [C]’s devotional stance of gratitude for the gift of [D’s] life became my own language of healing. “Thank you for all you’ve shared with us,” [C] taught me.

Now, I see grief everywhere, not only in the hard losses. In airport goodbyes and in silent faces in waiting rooms, in the balloon that slips a child’s grasp flying sky-bound. Grief-Sight is none other than this: to be present with this human condition, in the daily ebbs and flows of majesty and loss, within which we have been graced with life.

Valk Fisher writes non-fiction, poetry and children's books, often on the subject of body. She runs writing-for-wellbeing workshops and is a PhD researcher at the University of Lisbon in writing-for-wellbeing applications in narrative medicine. She is finishing a memoir on illness, motherhood and care. More work can be found at valkfisher.com and the Broken Body Love Letters Project, an initiative that invites first-hand narrative of life with long-term illness/disability or follow @bbodyloveletters.

Fisher’s Field Notes essay “Diary of a Plunge Year” appears in the Fall-Winter 2025-26 Intima.