Candid Conversations Newsletter: Holding Space in the Dark

I often write about how privileged I feel to have some of my closest relationships. But relationships are never one-way. They are like a spider’s web, with continuous connections, intersecting points of context, and countless threads of give and take.

One of my defining moments of friendship, something close to a profound connection, happened on what seemed like a typical weekday. I don’t remember the exact day. A long-time friend called me out of the blue just to check in. At the time, I had recently moved to a new city and into a new home.

When the phone rang, I picked up. He had no idea that just days before, my entire world had come crashing down. My self-esteem, my self-respect, my identity, everything I had worked so hard to build as a man was in disarray. I was lost, clouded by an emotional fog.

We went through the usual motions:

“How’s everything?”

“Everything is everything,” I replied without missing a beat.

“Cool, just checking in. All good, brother?”

“All good.”

I wanted to believe that. Every part of me wanted to.

We hung up, but less than an hour later my doorbell rang. It was him. “I didn’t like how you sounded, bro, so I came to check on you.”

He sat with me for the next six or seven hours, not saying a single word. What seemed awkward at first morphed into exactly what was needed: presence. When I finally got up to cook, we ate together. Before leaving, he hugged me and simply said, “I see you.”

That day changed how I understood friendship. It showed me the quiet power of holding space. How sometimes silence can carry more weight than words.

Some years later, I asked him about that day. His reply was simple, yet sublime: “There was nothing I could say in that moment that you didn’t already know. I just didn’t want you to be alone.”

The Stages of Loss and the Weight of Culture 🪜

Loss comes in many forms. The death of a loved one. The end of a relationship. The loss of a job or career status. The emotional terrain is jagged and unpredictable. We often speak of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But rarely do we think about how culture shapes the way we move through them.

Some cultures grieve collectively, with rituals, crying, song, and public expression. Others expect grief to be private and orderly, as if silence were a form of strength. These cultural scripts decide how long we are allowed to mourn, how visible it can be, and what is considered strong or weak.

Grief is always personal, but it is never only personal.

Denial 🤥

When loss first arrives, denial shields us. It tells us this cannot be real. It buys us time while the heart catches up to what the mind already knows. Sometimes denial feels like replaying conversations on loop, hoping for a mistake, imagining a way back. Culture shapes how long we are allowed to stay there. Some demand we move on quickly. Others let us linger until we are ready to face the truth.

Anger 🤬

When reality sets in, anger often follows. We rage at fate, at God, at others, or at ourselves. Culture decides what happens next. In some places, anger is proof of love and loyalty. In others, it is weakness, something to be hidden. In professional life, anger can even be career-ending, so it festers quietly. Left unspoken, anger isolates. Shared in community, it can become fuel for healing.

Bargaining ⚖️

Bargaining is our attempt to make sense of loss. We whisper “what ifs” and “if onlys,” as if control could be bargained back to us. Sometimes it helps us reflect, but just as often it keeps us trapped in loops we cannot escape. Depending on where you stand, culture may frame bargaining as faith and resilience, or as weakness and regret.

Depression 🥺

When bargaining fails, the world loses its color. Food tastes different. Mornings feel heavier. Laughter feels hollow. What hurts most is not only the loss itself, but the isolation that follows.

Part of that isolation is tied to loss, the loss of a loved one or the loss of an identity we once called our own. Will Storr reminds us that humans are wired for meaning through the games we play. When the game is taken from us, whether the role we held, the relationship we lived in, the status we carried, or the identity we wrapped ourselves in, our sense of self begins to crumble.

Culture can soften the weight with collective rituals and mourning spaces, or it can sharpen it by asking us to carry it alone.

Acceptance 🉑

Acceptance is not forgetting. It is learning to live with the absence. It is the moment when memories bring warmth instead of paralysis. It is building around the hole instead of trying to fill it. It is realizing that while one game may be lost, there are always new ways to play, new ways to be seen, and new ways to find meaning.

Acceptance is also about identity. It is the slow work of understanding that who we are is not erased by what we lost. Identity can bend, adapt, and rebuild. It does not stay broken forever.

The Role of Community 🫂

Grief cannot be carried alone. Community is not optional. It is essential.

When a friend sits with you in silence, that is community. When family gathers to cook, pray, cry, or laugh, that is community. When colleagues or mentors remind you that you are more than your job, that is community.

Without it, grief lingers in shame and silence. With it, grief becomes something shared, something human.

Community cannot erase the darkness, but it can light small fires along the way. Those fires may not end the night, but they make the path visible enough for us to keep walking. Sometimes that is all we need, the courage to take the next step.

Where Do We Go From Here? 👣

Not everyone has the privilege of community. What do we do then? For me, the answer is agency. The choice to be our own advocate. To reach for professional help when it is needed. To sit with our emotions long enough to understand them. To find healthy, sustainable ways of coping and moving through.

Healing is never sudden. It takes time. Progress comes in inches, not miles. Yet every inch matters. Each small step forward, no matter how unsteady, is still movement toward becoming whole again.

And as my Whale-minded friend always reminds me, “you never take a step until you take a step”.