Three Losses One Heart

There are three graves now. Three losses stacked on top of one another in less than a year, and I've been bending under all of them at once. Three people I loved who aren't coming back and the heaviness of it — the actual, physical weight of carrying three losses at once in — is something I don't think I fully reckoned with until Sunday evening, when the third one arrived, and I realised my knees had already been bending under the first two.

I keep thinking about layers. How each loss doesn't sit separate from the others. They stack. They press down together and just when I've begun to find language for one grief, another one arrives and cracks everything open again.

But that's not even the loneliest part.

The loneliest part is that I can't just collapse with anyone. I wish it were simpler — I wish I could say people don't understand or don't care. That would almost be easier. Instead, I'm learning who is safe enough to trust with this rawness. I'm discerning. I'm sifting. I'm asking hard questions about who's proven themselves trustworthy, not just kind and that discernment — necessary, wise, protective as it is — is beginning to feel like a wall I've built with my own hands.

Because whilst I'm doing that work, I'm not collapsing. I'm holding myself together. I'm managing my own grief, telling myself I don't want to burden the people I love, that they're busy enough already, that my sorrow is too heavy for anyone to carry. I'm deciding on their behalf what they have capacity for.

And something about that feels less like wisdom and more like isolation dressed up as love.

—

I know there are safe people. I know who they are. I trust them with parts of myself I trust almost no one else with. They've proven themselves. They've shown me what it means to be held without being fixed, seen without being judged. They've earned the right to know me this way.

But I'm afraid to ask.

I'm afraid that my grief will be too much. That three losses stacked together will be the weight that finally breaks even the strongest people I know. So I protect them. I manage my own sorrow. I smile when I see them. I ask about their lives, their struggles, their weight. I make it safe to be around me.

What I don't do is ask them to stay.

Yet Jesus did. He knew the Father was with Him — that the deepest truth was secure and unshakeable. He knew what was coming, knew the ending of the story in a way His friends never could. He knew everything would be redeemed and still, in Gethsemane, He turned to His closest companions and said: "My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death. Stay here and watch with me."

He didn't ask them to explain His sorrow.
He didn't ask them to solve what was coming.
He didn't ask them to make sense of it.
He asked for presence.
Stay here. Stay with me.

He trusted them with the honour of witnessing His grief, not because they could fix it, but because love means showing up for what cannot be fixed.

—

Here's what I'm beginning to understand: a wound may be formed in one moment, but healing rarely happens that way. Healing comes through repeated experiences of truth, safety, love, and faithfulness — not because those positive experiences are weaker than the original hurt, but because trust is rebuilt through consistency.

This is why asking once isn't enough. This is why my fear runs so deep.

The negative experiences I've had — the moments when vulnerability wasn't safe, when my rawness was used against me, when asking for help met with dismissal or judgment — those moments carry a disproportionate weight in my heart. One failure of trust can eclipse a hundred faithful moments. That's the cruel mathematics of wounds: they're formed in an instant, but they cast long shadows.

New truth needs to be experienced repeatedly before an old expectation loses its power.

I know there are safe people. I believe it in theory. But part of me is still waiting for the other shoe to drop — still half-expecting the moment when they'll decide my grief is too much, when they'll grow tired of my need, when they'll prove that my fear was justified all along.

That fear isn't a character flaw. It's an wound learning to trust again.

—

I'm beginning to wonder if I've confused discernment with distance. If protecting people's peace has become another word for protecting myself from the risk of asking. If my wisdom about whom to trust has quietly become permission to trust no one with the full weight of what I'm carrying.

Discernment is real. Not everyone deserves access to my broken places. There are people I shouldn't fall apart with, boundaries I need to keep, vulnerabilities I need to guard. My values matter. My limits matter.

But there's a difference between wise discernment and self-imposed isolation.

There's a difference between protecting boundaries and refusing the people who love me the dignity of deciding what they have the capacity to help me carry. Love means allowing safe people to say yes to me — even when their lives are full, even when their time is scarce, even when it costs them something. Love means trusting them not just with who I am, but with what I'm carrying.

Perhaps part of what God is teaching me now isn't how to become stronger beneath the weight.

Perhaps He's teaching me that discernment doesn't only tell me whom not to fall apart with.

Sometimes, discernment tells me whom I finally can.

📖 "Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ." — Galatians 6:2 (NKJV)