In The Next Room...A New Take On Grief
by Dawn Carr, C.Ht.
Think back to when you were a child. It's late at night, the lights are off and you're half asleep. Through the wall you can hear the murmur of your parents talking. You hear the clink of a dish in the sink, a low laugh, and the hum of the television telling tales to the nighttime air. You couldn't see them. You couldn't reach out and touch them. But you weren't afraid because you knew exactly where they were. They were on the other side of the wall, in the next room.
That weightless, safe feeling of childhood is the closest thing that I can relate to you about feeling at peace with grief.
When someone is really grieving, the kind of grief that hollows a person out, I don't reach for theology or religious thought. I reach for the memories in the back of their mind. "Think of them as being in the next room."
It's such a small sentence, but watch what it does to a person's face. There's a pause. You can almost see the thought traveling to a place where it's never been allowed to go before. If they're simply in the next room, then I don't have to grieve them as if they've vanished. They still exist. They're just nearby. Then something remarkable happens. Something, somewhere in their body, not just in their mind, exhales. The stress and anxiety from grief starts to subside as they wrap their minds around the weightless safety of childhood. Everyone has that safe feeling somewhere deep inside. You just have to find it and bring it back into your life.
Here's the quiet problem with grief and physical death: people often disagree on what comes after it and that uncertainty creates its own kind of loneliness. Grief already feels like a canyon. Not knowing where your person went just makes the canyon wider.
But a room is a room. Everybody understands a room.
If you say they're just upstairs, something settles. If you say they're just down the hall, the distance stops feeling infinite. It's not about pinpointing heaven on a map. It's about shrinking the unbearable down to something the size of a house. Something with doors. Something you could, in theory, walk to.
Grief is a vast separation we're never quite ready to accept, but the idea of the next room doesn't ask you to accept it all at once. It just slides something warm into your mind. A door that's slightly ajar. The sense that a conversation could still happen, that you could still talk to them because they haven't really gone away. They've only gone a few steps further than you're currently allowed to go.
Try it. Next time the sadness comes in heavy, don't let the feeling weigh you down. Instead, picture yourself safe and sound in a cozy room resting on a comfy couch. Let your mind sit with this image instead of your loved one's absence. Never underestimate the power of your own words and how they can shape the size of your grief. The more deliberately you practice seeing it this way, the more that image stops being a coping mechanism and starts being something closer to belief. Comfort often begins as something we need to convince ourselves to feel before it becomes something that we just simply do.
The next time you feel that your loss is too big to hold, picture this instead: Somewhere close, somewhere warm, your loved one is nearby with the light still on under the door...in the next room. ✨
July 14, 2026
