What Are You Grieving That No One Knows About?

Hi, this is Masami. I am the counselor and owner here at Ajisai.

You may not know how grateful I feel that you are here, reading my very first blog post.
Truly, thank you for being here.

To be honest, creating my own private practice was never my biggest dream. It was
somewhere on my list, but certainly not at the top. I decided to take this step because life
has changed so much for me over the past few years, and I found myself wanting to create
something meaningful from all that change.
I don't know exactly where Ajisai will go, or whether I will feel successful in this work. There
is still so much uncertainty.

And perhaps that is one reason I chose to begin here—with a reflection on loss and grief,
something I have come to understand through both my work and my own life.
Over the past twenty years I have lived in the United States, I have often been told, “You
are unique,” or “You are different.” Teachers, mentors, friends, and even people who
barely knew me have said this.
For a long time, I wasn't quite sure what they meant.
I have some ideas now.
Perhaps part of it comes from being bicultural and bilingual. I grew up in one country and knew only one language, Japanese, and then spent the next chapter of my life in another. I have lived between languages, cultures, expectations, and ways of understanding the world.
And I am still somewhere in the middle of that journey.
Maybe that is why I have become so interested in what happens when life changes—and
what we lose along the way.

I began this work before I had any credentials, as a caregiver in nursing homes, helping
older and disabled adults with bathing, dressing, and eating. Later, as a social worker in
hospice, I spent about ten years alongside families during the last weeks and days of life.
People often assume hospice work is mostly about death.
Over time, I came to see something different.

Death is one moment. Loss can begin long before it.

I saw grief in rooms where no one had died yet. A wife grieving the conversations she and
her husband used to have. A daughter grieving the mother who was still there, but who had
not known her name for two years.
No flowers arrived for those losses. No one brought a casserole to the door. There was no
bereavement leave from work.
Sometimes people would apologize to me for being upset about something that, in their
words, wasn't really a loss.

It was.

I know this from my own life too.
I moved to another country by myself, and I have changed schools and places more times
than I can easily count. Every move brought something new, and every move meant
leaving something behind.

There is a particular kind of grief in being the one who leaves. You are supposed to be
grateful, and often you are, and you are also mourning.
Both can be true.

Then illness became part of my story. I have experienced serious illness, and it taught me a kind of loss I had mostly understood from the outside.
The loss of trust in your own body. The loss of familiar routines. The loss of time spent in
waiting rooms and recovery instead of in your own life. And the losses inside relationships,
when something changes and you find yourself missing what you had before while still
being grateful for what remains.

There is also the loss of being understood.

People may want to help and not know what to say, so they step away. Eventually, you
may wonder whether you should stop feeling what you feel.

I don't think grief always needs to be fixed.
Sometimes it needs to be acknowledged.
Grief and love arrive in the same package.

I have been reading Susan Cain's Bittersweet, which explores how sorrow can be part of a
meaningful life rather than something that simply needs to be corrected.
Grief is not only what happens after someone dies. It can arise whenever something that
mattered has changed or been lost: a person, a relationship, a home, a country, a role, a
body you recognized, or a future you had already imagined.

You don't have to wait until your grief becomes overwhelming. You don't have to prove that
your loss is big enough. And you don't have to explain why it hurts.
If something mattered to you, and now it is different or gone, it is okay to grieve.

You are allowed to miss what was.
You are allowed to be grateful for what is.
And you are allowed to wonder about what comes next.

That is where we can start.

I’m here.
Let’s talk.

Warmly,

Masami