🕯️ Samhain and The Unspoken: Tending Grief, Memory, and What Still Haunts Us

The veil is thin, and so are the boundaries between past and present.

Samhain (pronounced sow-in) marks the end of the harvest and the beginning of the darker half of the year.
Rooted in ancient Celtic tradition, it honors the liminal space between seasons, between life and death, between what has passed and what is yet to come.

It is a time when the veil is thin. When ancestors draw near.
When ghosts, both real and symbolic, return.

And for me, this season always stirs what has gone unnamed.

The veil is thin. So are the boundaries between past and present.

Lately I’ve been thinking of Raven. Ausma. Of my Father. Of people who once stood close beside me, but now feel far away.

Some have passed.
Some simply disappeared.
And some are still living, but not in my life.

This season brings it all up, not just grief, but also unresolved grief.
The kind that lingers. The kind that lives in the body.
The kind that never got named.

What does it mean to honor someone who isn’t dead but is still gone?

That’s the question I keep circling.

We speak of ancestors this time of year and yes, I feel them close.
But I also feel the ghost of a friend who stopped calling.
The ghost of a version of myself I had to let go of to survive.
The ghosts of unspoken endings and relationships that dissolved without goodbye.

Not all loss is final, but it still needs to be honored.

Sometimes, tending to grief means making space for what was never acknowledged.
Sometimes it means sitting quietly with what haunts us, the memories that surface in the quiet and the feelings that have nowhere else to go.

This is a season of thresholds, dissolving, and return.

My body feels it.
After years of living hypo, heavy and fogged, I’ve swung toward hyper.
Racing. Wired. Always reaching.

I am moving from one imbalance to another.
But I am noticing it now. That’s something.

The biggest threshold I am facing is the realization that healing my autoimmune symptoms is deeply tied to healing my nervous system.

My body is asking for slowness.
For rhythm.
For a gentler pace that does not confuse urgency with meaning.

And I am listening, not perfectly, but more than before.

The garden always speaks back.

My dahlias bloomed late. They took their time.

My pineapple sage is still blooming on the balcony, through cold nights and changing skies, its red blossoms defiant and soft all at once.

She reminds me that resilience is not always about pushing harder.

Sometimes it is blooming anyway.

Sometimes it is knowing when to come inside.

Samhain is the season when the earth teaches us how to fall apart on purpose.

Leaves fall.
Roots deepen.
Compost forms.

And while we turn inward in the Northern Hemisphere, spring is rising in the South.

Wherever you are, in autumn’s grief or spring’s emergence, this moment is a threshold.

These cycles are mirrors.
They ask us to pay attention, not to force alignment.
To notice what is shifting within us too.

Grief gardens help me hold what cannot be spoken.

Sometimes they are planted in the ground.
Sometimes they live in pots on balconies.
Sometimes they are nothing more than a space created between breath and presence.

One client built a grief altar for their mother in a container.
A house made of popsicle sticks. A bird bath made from a thimble.
A railing made from salvaged materials, honoring the way their mother walked.

It was not elaborate.
But it was sacred.

A space that said, this mattered.

If you are carrying grief, spoken or unspoken, you are not alone.

Grief does not need fixing.
It needs tending.
And tending begins with presence.

You do not need to know what ritual means.
You do not need a garden or candles or the perfect words.

You can begin with breath.
You can offer a name.
You can place a stone on the windowsill.

Or simply sit with the memory that rises. That is enough.
And if you want to explore this work more deeply, I offer Grief Garden sessions for those walking with loss.

You can learn more about them [here].