On Grief That Arrives Late

Here's something I've been learning about myself for years and I'm only just starting to accept it fully. I don't process grief the way most people seem to.

When something big happens, a heartbreak, a loss, a shock, I can usually hold it together in the moment. I stay functional. I can run the call, lead the circle, finish the work, hold the space. And most people around me wouldn't know anything had landed at all. But underneath, things are moving more slowly than I can see. The feelings arrive later, in drips, sometimes months later, sometimes years. There are relational heartbreaks from a decade ago that I'm only really integrating now. Not because I was avoiding them. Because my system genuinely needs that much time to catch up with itself.

The armour I learned young

I think a lot of that is armour I learned young. I learned to feel outward, to track other people's states, to manage the room, to stay vigilant for what everyone else was experiencing. And in doing that, my own inner world became the last place I arrived at. It takes me longer than most people to actually land inside myself.

There's a particular kind of guilt that comes with that. Watching other people cry openly at a loss I can't access yet. Wondering why I'm not feeling it. Thinking something must be wrong with me that I'm still functioning when I should be on the floor. I've carried that guilt around for a long time, and what I'm learning now is that the slow processing isn't a defect. It's just how I'm built. My body will get there when it's ready, and trying to rush it only pushes the real feelings further underground.

Denise, in waves

I'm sharing this because the last few weeks have been a lot. Denise Hagen passed away, and as many of you know, she was one of the most important people in my life and in the work I do. I wrote about her when it happened and a lot of you responded with such tenderness. But the truth is I haven't fully felt it yet. It comes in waves. A song will start playing and I'll lose it for a few minutes. Then it will pass and I'm back in my body working on something else. That's how it moves through me. Not all at once. Not cleanly.

Being on the receiving end of my own work

What's helping is that this week Ani and I started the Heart iQ Challenge together, not just as the people leading it but as participants. It's strange and beautiful to go through my own programme from the inside. I built this work years ago and I know it intimately as a teacher, but being on the receiving end of it with Ani beside me is something else entirely.

The first week is all about slowing down. Not pushing. Not striving. Not trying to achieve or optimise or get anywhere. Just arriving. Noticing what's actually here. Feeling the subtle rather than chasing the intense.

That slowness is doing something in me I wasn't expecting. Old grief I didn't realise I was holding is starting to move. Something in the front of my body that has been braced for a long time is softening. Big decisions I've been carrying about my work and about New Eden, the retreat centre I own, are coming into sharper focus. Not because I'm forcing them to, but because the slowness is giving them space to speak.

What the funeral opened in me

I want to share one more thing, and it's the part that's hardest to name. I wasn't able to make Denise's funeral in person. I watched it over a link from here in the Canary Islands. And I want to be careful about how I say this because I know it will be tender for some people.

I noticed something in myself as I watched the ceremony. A resistance. A frustration. A wish that what was happening in that room had felt more like Denise. More like her music, her laughter, her fire, her tenderness. I'm still sitting with what that resistance is telling me about my own relationship to ritual and to the distance that can sometimes exist between what we do to mark a death and what the grief underneath us is actually asking for.

I'm not making a claim about anyone else's experience of that day. I know some people there were deeply moved. I'm just noticing my own reaction and owning that it's mine. It's part of what I'm processing, and the work I'm doing this week is helping me meet it rather than push it away.

In the middle of it

None of this is wrapped up neatly. I'm not at the end of anything. I'm just in the middle of it, letting it move at the pace my body can actually hold.

If you're someone who processes late like I do, I want you to know you're not broken. The slowness isn't avoidance. It's the only way some of us can actually metabolise what's real. And if you're grieving something right now, whether fresh or from years ago, I'm holding you in that. There's no right timeline. There's just the one your body can bear.

Thank you for being here with me as I let this land. 🤍

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Christian Pankhurst is the founder of Heart iQ, a methodology for embodied relational intelligence.