Grief, once it runs out of a target that can be blamed cleanly, starts looking for one that can be blamed at all.

Sioux is kneeling on the forest floor. Someone she depended on completely is gone. The grief is immediate and enormous. And in that moment, the line watches something quiet and almost mechanical begin to happen inside her. Grief, finding no clean place to land, starts casting around for any place at all. It is not a flaw in her. It is simply what grief does when the loss is too large and too sudden to sit with plainly.

Most of us know this movement, even if we have never named it. A loss arrives. We look for somewhere to put the weight of it. We reach for a cause, a person, a version of ourselves that could have done something differently. The searching feels purposeful. It rarely is.

Sometimes grief just needs to be grief, without a destination.

When you have felt this reaching in yourself, who or what did you find yourself blaming, and did it actually ease anything?