Composting Grief: Loving, Losing, and Beginning Again

This month I’m reflecting on grief after the recent loss of a brief and beautiful relationship. Early in our connection, a relationship-anarchic container emerged — a space shaped by curiosity, consent, and continuous negotiation rather than predefined roles or scripts. Relationship anarchy questions the usual assumptions of romantic connection: linear escalation, tacit expectations of exclusivity, and the double standards that often privilege one partner’s desire over another’s. It rejects the idea that love must follow a fixed trajectory, from dating to commitment to cohabitation, and instead encourages people to co-create agreements that reflect their needs, boundaries, and ethics in real time.

In our dyad, this meant everything was negotiated. Honesty and transparency were constant. Care and desire were acknowledged without hierarchy. Accountability was mutual. The space carried some of the attuned, emergent qualities I often see in groups — a living dialogue of responsibility, presence, and feedback — but grounded entirely in the intimate dynamics of just two people. Fluid, open, and non-prescriptive, it invited reflection, growth, and genuine attunement.

And it was beautiful. Warmth. Creativity. Depth. We practised an ongoing relational inquiry, naming sensations, checking assumptions, and offering feedback in real time — sometimes gently, sometimes with the kind of precision that asks you to grow. It was work, but enlivening work.

There were also edges. Conversations about power, integrity, sexuality, and responsibility. Moments where our values touched but didn’t fully align. Places where care was real, but the fit wasn’t quite right.

And so it ended — grounded, honest, and real. Not collapsing, not withdrawing, not ghosting. A clear and tender naming of limits and a wish for each other’s wellbeing.

I’ve never felt grief like this before. Perhaps that’s the sign of having loved well.

In Tending Grief, Camille Saparo Barton writes that we must tend to the grief of lost integrity, wholeness, and aligned action. If we don’t compost it, grief will rot and stink. That image lands deeply for me — grief as compost, the slow, living transformation of what once nourished us.

Rest supports this work. Stillness allows decay to become fertility. If we rush past grief — busying ourselves, numbing, bypassing — we miss the lesson. Grief isn’t dysfunction; it’s adaptive. Loss signals change. Grief is the body’s intelligence, pulling us down, slowing us, inviting us to notice what has shifted inside and around us.

I’m learning to let it work on me. To take stock of what was beautiful, what was difficult, and what was revealed. This grief has opened new insight into ethics, power, and what it means to live in integrity — especially where desire, care, and responsibility intersect.

I’ve also been reading Prentis Hemphill’s What It Takes to Heal. Hemphill emphasises that grief and healing are deeply embodied, relational, and ongoing — not just experiences of the mind or heart. Conflict, edges, and limits aren’t mistakes to avoid; they are teachers showing us where care, integrity, and accountability meet. Hemphill writes, “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously,” a line that resonates strongly with my experience in this relationship. Grief isn’t just sorrow; it’s a lived, felt process that reshapes the body, mind, and ethics of connection. Attending to it thoughtfully fertilises new growth, insight, and attunement.

I’m also reading The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller, which reminds us that grief is not a mistake but a teacher. It helps us adapt to a changed landscape. Without grief, there is no re-orientation — no true beginning again.

For me, this has meant recognising what worked in that relationship, what didn’t, and how to return to myself — newly alone, newly grateful, newly free. There is pain in the isolation, and also an emerging lightness as my body and mind recover and reorient.

If you’re grieving a relationship, a version of yourself, or a dream that didn’t unfold, I hope you can offer yourself time, stillness, and a soft place to land. Compost takes time, but it feeds the roots of what grows next.