Kintsugi Healing: How Grief, Loss, and Love Rebuild a Broken Heart

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Kintsugi Healing: Learning to Feel Again After Grief Five and a half years ago, I made a quiet decision that would change everything. I was going to put my heart back together. Not to return to who I was, but to become someone who could feel again. To crack it open and let love back in. I couldn’t feel it. Not love. Not gratitude. Not joy. I was numb. If you’ve ever experienced deep grief or trauma, you may know this feeling. It is not dramatic or loud. It is quiet. It is the absence of feeling. It is moving through your life like you are watching it happen instead of living it. So I created a visual in my mind. I imagined my heart shattered into pieces. And instead of trying to hide the cracks, I imagined them being filled with gold. This is the philosophy of Kintsugi. The Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. The belief that the break is not something to fix or erase, but something to honour. The history becomes part of the beauty. I decided my heart would be rebuilt this way. Not despite what I had been through, but because of it. Healing, Expansion, and the Moment Everything Changed When I entered my second healing journey, I could feel the difference immediately. I was more grounded. More aware. I had done the integration work. I was not trying to escape my pain this time. I was ready to meet it. And something shifted. On the final day, I experienced a level of emotion I did not know was available to me. I felt like I was standing at the edge of a cliff, heart wide open, arms stretched out, completely surrendered. Below me was a lush jungle, alive and vibrant. And from my heart, something extraordinary happened. Butterflies. Light. Color. Joy. It felt like pure love radiating out of me. Like the most powerful version of a Care Bear stare you could imagine. I was not chasing happiness. I was inside of it. For the first time in a long time, I felt alive. Fully. And in that moment, I understood something important. This is what is possible. Grief and Joy Can Exist at the Same Time That night, everything changed. My intuition told me to turn my phone on and call my sister. And that is when I found out my dad was about to die. Within hours of experiencing the highest emotional state of my life, I was on a plane to say goodbye to my father. There was no time to integrate what I had just experienced. No time to process the expansion. My heart was wide open, and life met me there with loss. I held his hand as he took his final breath. There are moments in life that split you open. This was one of them. To feel that level of joy and that depth of grief so close together is something I still do not have words for. It was intense. It was disorienting. It was human. This is the duality of grief. We are capable of holding both. Rebuilding a Heart Through Grief and Resilience Healing is not about going back to who you were before the loss. It is about becoming someone new. This is the essence of what I teach through the Navigating Grief Framework. A process that supports people in moving through grief while strengthening their resilience muscle. Grief is not linear. Healing is not a checklist. But there are ways to support yourself through it. Grounding yourself in the present moment.Creating rituals that allow your emotions to move.Reflecting on what you have lost and what still matters.Leaning into support instead of isolating.Taking small steps forward, even when it feels impossible. This is how we rebuild. Not all at once. Piece by piece. Feeling Again: Where I Find Love Now Over time, something began to change. I started to feel again. Not all at once. Not in a big, cinematic moment. But in small, quiet ways. At concerts, when the music moves through my body.At festivals, surrounded by energy and connection.With my cats, in the stillness of being present.At our summer home, where time feels softer.On any beach, by any body of water, where I can breathe deeper.On hikes, where nature reminds me that everything continues. These moments became my proof. Proof that love was still accessible to me. Proof that my heart was healing. The Gold Is in the Cracks Today, I can feel it. The love. The gratitude. The connection. And I can also feel the grief. Both exist. Both are true. That is the beauty of Kintsugi. The cracks do not disappear. They become part of the story. They are filled with something stronger. I can feel the gold filling the spaces where my heart once broke. And maybe that is the point. Not to be unbroken. But to be beautifully rebuilt. Let’s navigate your grief and first last breath together, XX Blair P.S. I offer a complimentary call. If you want to see what it’s like to work with me as a Grief and Resilience Coach, book a time here. [https://calendly.com/blairkaplanvenables/bounce-forward-30-minutes] Where’s Blair? May 3-5, La Le Jeune, BC Join me, Stacey and Simone this May at the Regulated Retreat [https://lljresort.com/regulated/]. I’m stoked to be speaking at Regulated, a three-day nervous system reset retreat for people who are done surviving and ready to feel steady again because most of us don’t need more motivation, we need regulation. And that’s what makes this experience different. This retreat blends nervous system science, movement, nature, and honest conversation to help your body downshift and reset. I’m honoured to be part of this experience and would love to share it with you! Early bird rates end March 15th! May 11-14, 2025, Vancouver, BC I’ll be attending Web Summit Vancouver so that I can sharpen my skills and spread our mission. August 23-29, Porto, Portugal I will be co-facilitating the Portugal Grief Trip alongside Rachel from Happy Grieving. There is still room for you. Learn more and book your spot! [https://grieftrips.com/portugal] How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading How We Navigate Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe [https://howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

My Dad Was Sick, Not Bad: What Addiction Taught Me About Forgiveness

In 2019, I walked onto a stage in my hometown and shared my story publicly for the very first time. My mom was there. My dad was there. My Baba Leah was there. I could see them in the room while I delivered my keynote, and I will carry that image with me for the rest of my life. I am so grateful now that I spoke while he could still hear me. I had spent years keeping certain things quiet. And what I learnt about keeping skeletons in your closet: you forget that, amongst those bones, there is flesh and organs. Sometimes those skeletons are not secrets at all. They are real people, with real struggles, real pain, and real love. Not all secrets are meant to be kept. Understanding Addiction Changed How I Understood My Whole Life My father struggled with addiction, and he faced serious health challenges on top of it. For a long time, I did not have the words or the framework to make sense of what happened in our family. But the more I learned about addiction, the more clearly I understood why things unfolded the way they did. Knowledge did something I did not expect. It softened me. The more I knew, the more I understood, and the more I was able to actually help with his recovery instead of carrying resentment. The Lesson That Changed Everything: My Dad Was Sick, Not a Bad Person My dad was sick. He was not a bad person. That single shift in thinking changed my life. It moved me from anger to compassion, from distance to connection, from holding on to letting go. It gave me back something I thought addiction had taken for good. It gave me the ability to forgive and the freedom to love him fully while I still had him. When you stop seeing illness as a character flaw, everything changes. The person you were afraid to love becomes someone you can finally hold close. I am grateful every single day that I made that shift in time. Why Community Mattered in His Recovery My dad faced many physical health challenges. He was diagnosed with COPD, and he needed a lung transplant, but he wasn’t eligible due to lung cancer. That sentence was heavy to live, and it is even heavier to write now that he is gone. He was given 1.5 to 2 years to live. I want to say a huge thank you to Jewish Child and Family Service in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, for inviting me to share my story at their AGM, and for everything they did for my father and our family. JCFS was an enormous source of support during some of the hardest stretches of this journey. I lived on the other side of the country, far from my family, and that distance was one of the hardest parts of all of it. But knowing my dad had a community around him and a team behind him gave me peace of mind I could not fully put into words. When you cannot be there in person, knowing that someone else is showing up for the people you love is everything. February 18, 2022 My dad, Leonard Ian Kaplan, died on February 18, 2022. Grief is strange. It does not undo the forgiveness. If anything, it makes me more certain that forgiveness was the right and only path. I do not have to wonder whether he knew I loved him, because I told him, and I showed up for him, and I learned to see him clearly while he was still here. He was sick. He was never bad. And he was loved until the very end. To Everyone Who Listened To everyone who joined us for that AGM in 2019, who has followed my journey and to everyone reading this now, thank you for listening. Thank you for holding space for a story that took me years to be brave enough to tell. If you are carrying a family secret about addiction right now, I hope you hear this clearly: You are allowed to learn. You are allowed to understand. You are allowed to forgive. And you are allowed to keep loving someone who is sick, for as long as you have them, and long after they are gone. Some skeletons have a heartbeat. Mine did. He is my dad, and I love him. Frequently Asked Questions Is addiction a disease or a choice? Addiction is widely understood by medical and mental health professionals as a chronic illness, not a moral failing or a simple choice. Reframing my father as sick rather than bad was the shift that allowed me to forgive him and love him fully while he was still alive. How can families support a loved one in recovery from a distance? Learning about addiction, staying connected, and leaning on community organizations are some of the most powerful things you can do. For my family, having a local support team meant my dad was never alone, even when I could not be there in person. How do you find peace after losing a loved one to addiction and illness? For me, peace came from the work I did before he passed: learning, forgiving, and choosing love over resentment. Grief did not erase that work. It confirmed it. Saying what needed to be said while he could still hear me is the reason I can grieve without regret. What support does Jewish Child and Family Service offer? JCFS in Winnipeg provides support to individuals and families facing a range of challenges, including health crises and the impact of addiction. Their care for my father and our family was an essential part of our story. If this story resonated with you, share it with someone who needs to hear that their loved one is sick, not bad, and that it is never too late to choose love. Subscribe for more honest writing about addiction, family, forgiveness, grief, and resilience. XX Blair P.S. I am booking keynotes and workshops for fall and winter, into 2027. Interested in having me speak at your event or to your organization? Let’s talk: blair@blairkaplan.ca. Where’s Blair? * August 3, Birmingham, Alabama Alana and I have been invited to be the keynote speakers at Integrating the Pieces: A Workshop on Resilience, Loss and Grief for the University of Montevallo. * August 23-29, Porto, Portugal I will be co-facilitating the Portugal Grief Trip alongside Rachel from Happy Grieving. There is still room for you. Learn more and book your spot! [https://grieftrips.com/portugal] * September 8-10, Champneys Tring, UK Often dubbed the "Glastonbury for business," this two-day outdoor networking event is for founders and entrepreneurs. It features keynotes, startup finals, and wellness programming, running 9–10 September 2026 at Champneys, Tring, Hertfordshire. Enter to win a free ticket and join me! [https://ideasfest.uk/speaking/blair-830cb7] * October 2-4, La Le Jeune, BC Join me, Kayla and Simone this May at the Regulated Retreat [https://lljresort.com/regulated/]. I’m stoked to be speaking at Regulated - Autumn Exhale, a three-day nervous system reset retreat for people who are done surviving and ready to feel steady again, because most of us don’t need more motivation; we need regulation. And that’s what makes this experience different. This retreat blends nervous system science, movement, nature, and honest conversation to help your body downshift and reset. I’m honoured to create and be a part of this experience and would love to share it with you! * January 3-9, 2027, Marrakech, Morocco Join me and Happy Grieving for the Morocco Grief Retreat to kick off 2027. Grief can make the world feel small. Morocco does the opposite: it fills the senses without demanding anything from you. The souks, the spices, the calls to prayer, life continuing everywhere, in colour. And then there’s the stillness to balance it: a traditional hammam to let your body release what it’s been holding, pottery in the medina, a full day in the Agafay Desert where the horizon gives your thoughts somewhere to go. Daily grief workshops thread it together, always optional, always held by facilitators who have walked the path of loss themselves. Learn more and book your spot. [https://grieftrips.com/destinations/morocco/] https://grieftrips.com/destinations/morocco/ How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading How We Navigate Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe [https://howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

7. juli 20265 min

Grievorcée: A New Word for Grieving Someone Who Is Still Alive

I am not a widow. My wasband is still alive yet, I feel the version of him I once loved is not. He breathes. His heart still beats. And yet I grieve him in a similar way that I’ve grieved the dead, in the good outfit, eating shiva loaf, being still, in the dark, in the small hours when the house is quiet, and my thoughts are loud. A stroke took him. Not all of him. Just the part I married. So if I am not a widow, what am I? I went looking for the word and found a hole where it should have been. So I poured something new into the shape of that absence and let it set. The word is grievorcée, and once you have it, you will wonder how you ever went without. What Is a Widow? Let us begin where the language is sturdy. A widow is a woman whose spouse has died and who has not remarried. The word is ancient, Old English widewe, with cousins in nearly every tongue, because grief of this kind is older than grammar. To be a widow is to be a survivor of a marriage ended by death. The vow was kept. Til death do us part, and death did. The widow has a great deal, and I do not say this lightly. She has casseroles and condolence cards. She has a date on a calendar. She has a body to bury and a name to put on a stone and a room full of people who all agree, out loud, that something has been lost. She has permission to mourn. That permission is the thing. That is the inheritance I was denied. What Is a Grievorcée? grievorcée /ˌɡriː·vɔːrˈsiː/ verb. To grieve a person who is still alive; to mourn the loss of someone not through their death but through estrangement, distance, illness, or profound change, while they yet draw breath. “After the dementia took the last of her mother’s memories, she found herself grievorcéeing the woman who still sat across the table.” noun, grievorcée: the living person who is so grieved. “She had become a grievorcée to her husband after their marriage ended.” Etymology: a blend of grieve and divorce, with the -ée suffix marking the one acted upon (compare divorcée), capturing the severing of a bond from someone who remains present in body but lost to the relationship. Read it again. Feel how it lands. A divorce ends a marriage by choice. A death ends it by force. The marriage does not fully end, at the beginning (or, ever?). It simply empties. He is still here. He is my wasband, the man who was, the man whose face I know better than my own, and whose mind has gone somewhere I am not allowed to follow. I am the grievorcée. Grieving a Living Spouse: The Loss Nobody Names There is a clinical term for the territory, and I will give it to you because precision is a kindness. The psychologist Pauline Boss called it ambiguous loss, the grief that comes when someone is physically present but psychologically gone, or psychologically present but physically gone. It is a loss without proof. Loss without the courtesy of a corpse. Ambiguous loss is the wife whose husband has dementia. The daughter of the addict who left and became no longer recognizable. The son of the man who survived the accident and never quite returned to the room. It is grief that cannot complete itself, because the thing you are grieving keeps walking through the kitchen asking where the remote is. My friend, Stephanie Sarazin, wrote a brilliant book about this type of loss called Soulbroken: A Guidebook for Your Journey Through Ambiguous Grief [https://stephaniesarazin.com/home/ambiguous-grief-book/], which expands on Pauline Boss’s seminal work on ambiguous loss. With touching personal stories of loss onset by divorce, addiction, betrayal, trauma, incarceration, Alzheimer’s, estrangement, and more, Soulbroken explores the complications and deviations from traditional grief when mourning a loss, but not physical death, and offers practical solutions for healing. The clinicians, like Boss, had the concept. What they lacked, what we all lacked, was a word you could wear. Ambiguous loss is accurate, and it is also a phrase you cannot say at a dinner party without explaining yourself for ten minutes. Grievorcée, you can say in two syllables and a sigh. It does the explaining for you. Why I Needed a New Word Because the old ones lied. When people asked after him, I had no honest reply. The forms have a box for married, a box for widowed, a box for divorced, and not one box for technically married to a man I miss with my whole body while he sits twelve feet away. Grief without a name is grief without a home. It wanders. It shows up in the wrong places, at the wrong volume, and everyone around you decides, quietly, that you are simply difficult now. That you have not “moved on.” Moved on from what, exactly? Nobody died. Try explaining that you are in mourning for a living man and watch how fast the room finds something else to look at. So I named it. I put on the metaphorical fur, I dripped myself in the cold fire of the right vocabulary, and I walked back into my own life with a word that finally matched the size of the thing. I am a grievorcée. My wasband is my grievorcée, present and gone, here and lost, mine and not. It is not a happy word. But it is true, and after long enough in the company of lies, truth is the most glamorous thing a woman can put on. If you are a fresh grievorcée or a seasoned one, you are not difficult, and you have not failed to move on. You are grieving a loss that the world forgot to give a name to. Now it has one. Wear it well. XX Blair P.S. If you have any advice for me, who is one month in, please comment below or send me a message. Where’s Blair? * June 23-24, Unleash AI for Business Summit Learn the RIGHT Way to Use AI — And Get More Done in 1 Week Than Most People Will All Year For anyone ready to create more content, faster, without the burnout — whether you’re building a business, scaling a side gig, or looking to work smarter. SIGN UP HERE. [https://www.unleashaiforbusiness.com/link.php?id=864&h=9439bd982a] * June 24, online, Beyond Grief: a Roundtable on Living Fully After Loss What happens when grief isn’t as heavy as it once was? This candid, multi-voice conversation explores what it means to live fully after loss. While much of the grief space centers on surviving, this roundtable makes space for what comes after the initial sorrow that follows loss and life-altering change, when life begins to expand again, often in unexpected ways. Together, grief and resilience leaders, podcasters, and grief-informed creators explore meaning-making, post-traumatic growth, and the nuanced reality of carrying grief while also reclaiming joy, purpose, and possibility. This is the conversation for everyone who needed to know grief shifts, that joy and aliveness are possible, and for everyone who’s arrived at lighter and isn’t sure what to do with that. REGISTER HERE. [https://letsreimagine.org/76768/beyond-grief-a-roundtable-on-living-fully-after-loss] * June 25, Kamloops, BC I will be in Kamloops. BC, MCing a golf tournament for a private client. * June 28-July 2, Sawtooth Survival Skills Gathering, Sawtooth Mountains, Idaho, with Hazen Audel At the Sawtooth Survival Skills Gathering [https://www.hazenaudel.com/primitive-skills-gathering-2026], we believe that there’s nothing quite like the bond formed around a campfire, learning to craft a shelter with your own hands, or trading knowledge with those who share your love for the outdoors. Our gathering brings together individuals of all skill levels who seek to deepen their understanding of traditional skills, self-sufficiency, and natural living. Over the course of several days, participants will immerse themselves in hands-on workshops, demonstrations, and meaningful discussions led by experienced instructors. All the while enjoying the beautiful Sawtooth Mountains, Payette River, and natural hot springs. Whether you’re here to hone your bushcraft skills, practice primitive fire-starting techniques, or simply take a step back from the hustle and bustle of modern life, you’ll find a welcoming community and a place to reconnect with the wild. * August 3, Birmingham, Alabama Alana and I have been invited to be the keynote speakers at Integrating the Pieces: A Workshop on Resilience, Loss and Grief for the University of Montevallo. * August 23-29, Porto, Portugal I will be co-facilitating the Portugal Grief Trip alongside Rachel from Happy Grieving. There is still room for you. Learn more and book your spot! [https://grieftrips.com/portugal] October 2-4, La Le Jeune, BC Join me, Kayla and Simone this May at the Regulated Retreat [https://lljresort.com/regulated/]. I’m stoked to be speaking at Regulated - Autumn Exhale, a three-day nervous system reset retreat for people who are done surviving and ready to feel steady again, because most of us don’t need more motivation; we need regulation. And that’s what makes this experience different. This retreat blends nervous system science, movement, nature, and honest conversation to help your body downshift and reset. I’m honoured to create and be a part of this experience and would love to share it with you! How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading How We Navigate Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe [https://howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

15. juni 20268 min

Kintsugi Healing: How Grief, Loss, and Love Rebuild a Broken Heart

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