Yusuf Ali

About

The people who find me are often the ones who did not get much sympathy in the first place. The friend rather than the spouse, the estranged sibling, the person whose loss was complicated by a difficult history and who therefore felt disqualified from being upset at all. Grief does not check whether you were on good terms first. It arrives regardless, and it is often more tangled when the history was hard, because you are mourning the person and also the version of them you never got to have. We make room for all of it, including the relief, which almost nobody feels able to admit anywhere else. Community mental health is where I trained, where the losses I encountered were rarely simple and almost never came with sympathy cards. That shaped how I work. If you have felt disqualified from your own loss, you would be welcome here.