Grief doesn’t just hurt. It hesitates. Especially when the people around you are hurting too.
In his conversation on Embracing All of Me, poet Nicholas Cairns names a rarely spoken truth about loss: the instinct to protect others from your pain. After his father’s death, grief wasn’t only personal. It was shared. Siblings, family members, loved ones all carried the same absence, but not in the same way. And that difference mattered.
“There’s a part of you that doesn’t want to worry them with your sadness,” Nick reflects. Not because the grief isn’t real, but because it already is, everywhere. In moments like this, speaking can feel less like release and more like redistribution.
Poetry became a way to hold grief without handing it off.
Nick describes writing as a private space where pain can exist without explanation, reassurance, or repair. Unlike conversation, poetry doesn’t ask you to edit yourself for the comfort of others. It doesn’t require closure. It doesn’t need consensus. It simply listens.
This is especially true for men, who are often socialized to “take it on the chin” rather than speak what hurts. Writing offers a different ethic, one rooted in care. Not silence as suppression, but silence as containment. A place where grief can breathe without becoming a burden.
What emerges isn’t isolation, but intention. Poetry becomes an act of emotional responsibility: I will face this honestly, without asking you to carry it for me.
Grief doesn’t need an audience to be valid. Sometimes the most loving thing we can do, for ourselves and for others, is to give our pain somewhere safe to land.
This episode is a reminder that healing isn’t always loud. Sometimes, it’s written quietly, line by line.