The Quiet That Asks Something of You
Grief, Release, and Being Witnessed
There’s a particular quiet that lives inside a cemetery not silence exactly, but a hush that seems to ask something of you the moment you step into it. I felt it on Saturday standing where my parents rest, watching my husband walk back to the truck without a word and return with paper towels no request from me, no hesitation on his part just a quiet decision to kneel down and wipe the leaves, sand, and grass cuttings from my parents’ headstone himself, like it’s the most natural thing in the world to tend to parents in the same way he attends to me.
I hadn’t been in a while. Long enough that I wasn’t sure how the visit would land in my spirit — whether I’d feel numb, or nostalgic, or nothing at all. You never really know until you’re standing there.
What I felt was none of those things. What I felt was everything at once, rising up before I could brace for it.
The emotion didn’t creep in slowly. It bubbled up and spilled over, the way water does when you’ve forgotten it’s on the stove — sudden, undeniable, impossible to pretend isn’t happening. And in that moment, something in me went quiet enough to notice what was actually true: that whatever I was feeling in my body was real. Not performed, not exaggerated, not something to talk myself out of. Real.
I’ve come to believe that naming what you feel — actually putting words to it instead of letting it stay a vague pressure in your chest — is one of the most healing things a person can do. Acknowledging a feeling is different from simply having one. It’s the difference between a wave crashing over you and a wave you finally turn to face. Standing there, I named it. Grief. Love. Missing them. And naming it made room for it to move through me instead of just sitting there, stuck.
So I let the tears come. I am not afraid of them anymore — not afraid of what falls, or how much, or who sees it. They rolled down my face gently, without drama, and I gave them permission to just sit there — on my skin, in the air between me and the stone — for a moment. Maybe two. I knew, somewhere underneath the crying, that those tears had earned their place. They had waited, maybe for years, for the exact right moment to escape, and when they finally did, I felt something I can only describe as validated. Like my own grief had been given permission to exist by the one person whose permission actually matters: me.
There’s a reason crying can feel like relief instead of just sadness. Tears are the body’s own release valve — a natural way of moving feel-good emotion through and out of us, not just the heavy ones. That’s what it felt like standing there: not a breakdown, but a release. Not something happening to me, but something happening for me.
My husband didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. He’s been standing beside me long enough through enough hard seasons, enough moments that tested what we’re made of to know exactly what that kind of stillness means. Instead of pulling me into him the way some might, he simply stepped in close, walked beside me, let his presence be the steadying thing rather than the interrupting one. He understood, without a word passing between us, that some moments don’t need to be fixed or soothed. They just need to be witnessed.
We turned and started back toward the truck eventually, the way you do — the ordinary motion of leaving a place that just held something extraordinary. And even in that walk, I could feel him there beside me, offering the same quiet reassurance he’s offered through every hard chapter of our marriage. Not a solution. Not advice. Just steadiness. Just here.
He knew the tears needed to fall.
He knew the release was needed.
And maybe that’s the real gift in a marriage that’s weathered its share of storms — not that someone shows up with the right words, but that they know when no words are required at all. That they can stand next to your grief without trying to shrink it, hurry it, or explain it away. That they simply let you feel what’s true, for as long as it takes to feel it.
I don’t know exactly what I expected from today’s visit, what I knew for sure is that I needed the time at the graveyard on Saturday. I don’t think I expected anything, really just uncertainty about how it would sit with me. But I think I needed those tears more than I realized. I think some part of me had been carrying them, so much has happen, so much I want to say, desire to say the family changes, the politics, I had become an author, gone and graduated from grad school and that I had completed so much over the past ten years—I wonder what would they say. All of these things all sitting just beneath the surface waiting for a the moment to let it go.
Grief doesn’t always arrive on schedule. Sometimes it waits for the exact right afternoon, the exact right hush, the exact right hand sweeping dust from a stone — and then it simply asks to be let out.
Today, I let it out. And I’m grateful I wasn’t standing there alone.
This is the kind of moment I write about in my new release, Rising Above: Journey Within — A Holistic Approach to Healing. So much of healing, I’ve found, isn’t about fixing or fast-forwarding through the hard parts. It’s about naming what you feel, acknowledging it without judgment, and letting yourself actually feel it — because that feeling is essential, not optional. The book also explores something I experienced firsthand at that headstone today: that crying isn’t only a symptom of sadness. It’s a natural release of feel-good emotion, the body’s own way of moving us from holding on toward letting go. If today taught me anything, it’s that rising above doesn’t mean rising out of your feelings. It means journeying within them, all the way through, until you come out the other side lighter.
Today, I let it out. And I’m grateful I wasn’t standing there alone.
Thank you for doing me on this very personal journey.
Anna Laura
#grief recovery #traumainformed #resilience #faith #healing #risingabove #journeywithin
Daddy & Momma rest forever in my heart.
Grief never ends it shows up as love lingering long within the heart.
