There is a moment in grief, which is often quiet and unannounced, when the world softens around the edges of something raw. Suddenly, something unexpected enters the room.

The experience may arrive as a dream that feels less like imagination and more like a profound moment of connection. A familiar scent like perfume or cologne may start drifting through a place where no one should be. You may experience a sudden sense of being lovingly accompanied when you feel most alone, or a spontaneous song on the radio that carries such precision and memory it briefly stops time.

People rarely speak of these moments. Not because they are rare, but because they are difficult to place inside the larger cultural stories we have been taught about death in our modern era.

As a psychotherapist working with trauma and loss, I have come to recognize these experiences as part of grief’s hidden language; the subtle, sometimes mystical ways the........

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