They bring flowers when soil is what is needed. They bring colours, ragrant scents, and soft petals because they do not know how to bring silence, and silence to me is medicine for their heart that has forgotten its own shape. People offer beauty when they cannot offer depth. They offer advice when what is required is presence. They fill the room with words, so, they cannot hear the sound of grief breathing beside them.
In the aftermath of loss, I have learned how uncomfortable truth becomes when others enter the space. Grief is a landscape that obeys no clock and no social rule. It fucks you internally and externally, expanding like an uncharted country, and people come to it carrying maps drawn from their own grief. They want to be helpful, yet they avoid the raw bleeding land. They speak because silence exposes them. Their advice becomes a shield they lift against the discomfort of witnessing someone unravel.
It reminds me of the ancient philosophical idea that the mind cannot sit with what it cannot name. Pain that stretches beyond language frightens people, so they begin to place labels on it, like children pinning butterflies to boards. There is a theory in psychology, not expressed in these exact words but present in spirit, that humans fear emotional contagion. When someone sits beside an open wound, they sense the magnetic force of sorrow of it and worry it might open their own. So instead of entering the cavern, they build a bridge of sentences and hang over the edge, whispering comfort from a safe distance. They forget that grief does not need to be solved. It needs to be witnessed. Carl Rogers spoke of unconditional positive regard, of offering presence without judgement or repair. Yet most people translate that into reassurance, or worse, instruction.
I keep thinking about the soul as a garden that occasionally burns to ash. After the fire, the ground is black and hot, and nothing grows yet. But it is fertile in its own strange way. Ash holds nutrients. Even the forest trusts the burn. But when people rush in with bouquets, they forget that flowers placed on scorched earth only wilt. What the land needs is stillness, rain, time. Soil is not romantic. Soil is not decorative. Soil is honest. Advice is often a bouquet. Presence is soil.
And so I find myself learning how to protect the spaces inside me. How to sit with my own ache the way I wish others would. I am recognising the spiritual truth that grief is a teacher who does not speak aloud. Its lessons arrive through sensation, through the rearrangement of the inner self. It is such a paradox that pain expands consciousness even as it tears the heart apart. To grow, one must allow the tearing. To heal, one must endure being unmade.
The aftermath of grief is not a place for performance. It is a cave where the self is stripped of all costumes. And perhaps that is why people fear offering silence. To sit with someone in that cave demands that they momentarily set down their own masks. It demands real presence, the kind that does not hide behind advice.
And so I make this promise to myself. In a world obsessed with bouquets, in a world of people who rush to cover wounds with colour and fragrance, I will choose to be soil. I will choose to be the ground that listens without flinching, the place where another person can fall apart without being hurried into bloom. I will offer presence instead of petals, silence instead of solutions, depth instead of decoration. If someone comes to me carrying their grief, I will not reach for flowers. I will open my hands and offer earth.