How Grief Heals Our Lineage

Wherever you are, however you are, please know that all of it is welcome here.

I just watched The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper and whoa. So timely because it put faces and history to my longing for communal grieving for our collective losses.

I wept, laughed, cried, and its lessons are continuing to grow in me. Please watch it – season 3, the episode on the Simril(l) family, one branch spelled with a single L, the other with two. One side of the family Black, one white.

It started with a man tracing his family roots and discovering that his ancestors enslaved people who share his last name. What unfolds is the story of two families, bound by blood and history, who choose to face the truth together. My heart is contracting like it’s ready to give birth as I remember.

They meet across the lines of race, pain, and time. They gathered side by side in the same church their ancestors once shared – then separated with blacks in the balcony, and slave owners below. Now integrated as family.

They walk through cemeteries, naming what was hidden. Instead of sugarcoating, they name the pain, the privilege, and feel the loss. And ten years in they keep showing up.

This is a picture of communal grief. Losses met with courage and love, transform us. Naming what has been silenced doesn’t divide us. Instead, it roots us deeper in truth, in belonging, in love big enough to hold it all.

I wonder, how many of us are living with inherited silence? Stories of harm, separation, survival. And what happens the moment we tell the truth?

Since I believe we are one, I’m also reflecting on:

What stories in our family lineage are ready to be named?

Where has silence kept us separated from ourselves, others, our communities, our world?

What would it mean to approach our history with love instead of shame?

If you can, watch the Whole Story episode on the Simril(l) family and listen to this week’s Grief Heals conversation. We belong to one another, and the truth, even when it hurts. What now constricts us may not permanently constrain us. What if it has the power to set us free?