The Shrine on the Kitchen Cabinet

I had parked the truck and was already mentally inventorying the treasures I was about to haul back for our charity bazaar. I am, at my core, a woman who gets quietly excited about other people’s things — the history in them, the second life waiting. So I walked in with my usual energy: smiling, purposeful, ready.

What I had not fully prepared myself for was what I would walk into. The man I was visiting had just lost his wife to cancer — thirty years of marriage, and now this apartment, and her things, and the task of deciding what to do with all of it. He was giving her belongings away: her jewellery tools, her beads, her crystals, rolls and rolls of wool, recipe books, all manner of things that quietly told you what kind of woman she had been. Robust. Joyful. Adventurous. Someone who made and baked and created. Someone who had filled a life.

He met me at the door with a smile that did not quite reach his eyes — the particular smile of a person who is holding themselves together with great effort and would rather you did not make a fuss about it. An older man, bespectacled, originally from New Zealand, posted to Malaysia years ago with his wife. And now here, alone, in a slightly darkened apartment.

What stopped me short was the sight on the kitchen cabinet. A shrine — there is no other word for it. A large photograph of her, smiling, flowers strewn around it, tea lights flickering. Candles lit throughout the apartment. The whole place held in a particular kind of hush. Grief was present in that room the way a person is present — you felt it before you named it. It hit me in the stomach as I turned slowly, taking it all in. His pain landed in my chest as though it were my own.

· · ·

I could not begin to imagine what it had cost him to pack up her things. To pick up each object and hold it — knowing that somewhere in the weight of a ball of wool or the smell of a recipe book, she was still there. How many times had he set something down and wept before he could pick it up again?

I took the boxes as quickly as I could. I understood intuitively that mercy, in this moment, was speed — that the kindest thing I could do was be efficient, be warm, and leave him to his grief without turning it into a performance. He had already done the hardest part. He had already said his goodbyes. I could see that in the way he moved through the apartment — steady, deliberate, spent.

As I drove away, I turned it over in my mind. What I had witnessed was not chaos or collapse, though both would have been entirely understandable. What I had witnessed was a man who had built himself a grief ritual — quietly, intuitively, without a therapist’s guide or a self-help book telling him how. He had made a shrine because he needed somewhere to put his love. He had lit candles because the darkness of a room can sometimes be the most honest response to loss. And he had given her things away — to charity, to people who would use them — because that was who she was. Generous. He was living out her values even in mourning her.

The depth of grief is the depth of love, made visible. There is nothing to fix in that. There is only something to honour.

In my practice I work with grief in many of its forms — the thunderous kind that announces itself, and the quieter kind that takes up residence in the body and pretends to be something else. One of the things I return to again and again with clients is the idea of the grief ritual: a deliberate, personal act of mourning that belongs entirely to you. Not prescribed, not performed for an audience, but constructed from the particular texture of the love you had and the particular shape of the loss you are holding.

This man had done that instinctively. He had not waited for permission. He had not asked whether a shrine on a kitchen cabinet was the correct or dignified way to grieve. He had simply done what love required of him — which was to make her presence felt in that apartment for a little while longer, and then, when he was ready, to release her things into the world with the same open-handedness she had lived by.

· · ·

I think about him still. I do not know his name. I do not know how he fared in the months after that afternoon. But I find myself hoping — with the kind of warmth that occasionally surprises me with its force — that he is doing well. That he allowed himself, in time, to look directly at the pain and hold it without flinching. That he found he could see a flower and remember her and smile, rather than buckle. That the shrine eventually came down not because he was over it — you do not get over thirty years — but because he no longer needed it to feel her near.

Grief is not an illness to be cured. It is love with nowhere left to go — and the work, over time, is finding it somewhere to go. Into memory. Into ritual. Into the carrying on of a person’s values in the way you live your own life. Into the ability to find joy again, not as a betrayal of them, but as the most faithful honouring of what they would have wanted for you.

If you are in the middle of a loss right now — or beside someone who is — I want you to know that there is no correct way to do this. A shrine on a kitchen cabinet is a grief ritual. So is a walk you take every morning on the same route you used to take together. So is cooking a recipe from their book and eating it alone at the table you shared. So is laughing at something they would have found funny and then crying because they are not there to laugh with you.

All of it counts. All of it is love, still moving.

— Nina
Psychotherapist  ·  Workplace Wellbeing Consultant  ·  Kopi with Nina