Summertime Grief and Shifts

Why can grief feel unexpectedly heavy during the summer?

While the holidays are often recognized as difficult for grieving people, the quieter shifts of summer can bring their own wave of longing, nostalgia, and remembrance. Longer days, changing routines, family traditions, vacations, and returning to familiar places can amplify the absence of someone we love or remind us of the life we once had.

In this solo episode of Grief and Light™, host Nina Rodriguez reflects on returning to her childhood home in Puerto Rico nearly seven years after the death of her brother, Yosef. Through personal storytelling, she explores her mother's beautiful phrase, "collapsing timelines," the experience of feeling the past and present at the same time, and why grief isn't only about the people we've lost. Sometimes we grieve entire seasons of life, former identities, places that shaped us, and versions of ourselves we thought would always remain.

Drawing on her own lived experience, grief-informed work, and the wisdom of poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Nina shares why healing is often less about finding answers and more about learning to live the questions. This conversation offers compassionate support for anyone navigating bereavement, sibling loss, life transitions, nostalgia, or the ongoing process of rebuilding life after profound loss.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why grief can feel different during the summer months

• How returning home can awaken memory, nostalgia, and unexpected emotions

• What "collapsing timelines" means and why familiar places can feel emotionally complex after loss

• Why we often grieve more than the people we've lost, including former identities, relationships, and seasons of life

• How living the questions can foster resilience, self-compassion, and post-traumatic growth

If this conversation resonates with you, you're warmly invited to join Nina Rodriguez and grief educator, author, and speaker Lisa Keefauver for a live three-part Substack "Summer Shifts Series" exploring curiosity, creativity, and possibility after grief and life's unexpected pivots.

Read the full essay and access the live series information here.

Transcript

One of life's greatest paradoxes is that the very thing capable of breaking us open can also deepen our relationship with life itself. You just lost your loved one. Now what? Welcome to the Grief and Life podcast, where we explore this new reality through grief colored lenses openly, authentically. I'm your host, Nina Rodriguez. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back to the Grief and Life podcast. My name is Nina Rodriguez and I am your host. And today's solo episode is a little different because we are recording from beautiful Puerto Rico. And as you may know, if you've been here for some time, we've taken a little summer break from the Grief and Life podcast as we do some behind the scenes work and gear up for the next season. But I wanted to take a moment to check in today because I wanted to name something that I've decided to call Summertime Grief, and it reminds me of that Lana Del Rey song, Summertime Sadness. It's just that like, happy, sad vibe that these are the brightest months of the year, and yet it could trigger such nostalgia and melancholy for what was actually wrote about it on Substack, and I want to share that with you. I also want to invite you to a virtual gathering that I'm hosting alongside the incredible Lisa Keefe. She is the host of Grief Is a Sneaky Bitch. She also has a book by the same name. She's also been a guest of the podcast. And together we are dreaming up a summer series that's going to be once a month for July, August, September, and each series is going to build on each other. It's going to take place on Substack, and I'm going to tell you all about it, but I want you to read this essay first so that you can understand where it's coming from. So without further notice, enjoy. Summer has a way of revealing absence. The days are longer and there are shifts in weather. There are summer camps, barbecues, family traditions, and a change of pace and routine. Each season in life and each season of the year asks us to adjust. If you've lost a beloved, then their absence can feel even more pronounced. Often in subtle ways compared to, let's say, the Christmas and end of year holidays. Those tend to be more in your face. But summertime brings a quieter kind of grief. And if you've experienced a major life shift like divorce or job loss, relocation, estrangement, loss of health, financial hardship, loss of security, etc. all the things that shift our lives, then the season has a way of bringing those losses to the surface, too. I'm in beautiful Puerto Rico, as we speak, specifically in the same town where my late brother Joseph and I spent our childhood years three decades ago. The kid version of us rode bikes through the winding hills of our coastal neighborhood. We climbed the flamboyan trees and pretended they were our houses. We would knock on our neighbor's doors to ask if our friends could come outside and play, and we would stand outside to watch our dad fly his ultralight plane over our house. There were no smartphones or social media. Nothing was done for the gram. Our connection was actually to nature, to our surroundings and to ourselves. It was just pure presence, which is one of the perks of being a vintage millennial born in the nineteen hundreds. Since then, decades have passed. We moved to mainland United States. We built our lives there, and my brother is no longer physically with us. We've lived through the rise of social media and now of AI. And somewhere along the way, practicing presence became a commodified part of the wellness industry. What came naturally to us has become something that we are taught to practice and often sold back to us. Reflecting on all of this while staying in the same neighborhood, in the same building here, where my family, then intact, spent a summer holiday is a trip in every sense. My mother calls it collapsing timelines. It's that time warping feeling of experiencing both the present and the past simultaneously. So while visiting Puerto Rico as I am now. I wake up each morning to breathtaking Caribbean palms dancing outside my window. And if you're watching on video, then you can kind of see them behind me. I hear the waves crashing in the distance. I feel the ocean breeze and I breathe the salty, humid air. And then I glance to my right and remember my brother and I riding golf carts through this very same complex as teenagers. This is a time collapse. The nostalgia being here is so, so real. Not just for the person we lost, but also for the version of the life that we lived and the simplicity that we assumed would always be here. The fresh air, the quiet, the simplicity have become luxuries in life. A meaningful connection with nature often requires planning or scheduling, booking time away from the lives we've built. I'm noticing how much has shifted, and remembering that grief isn't just about who we've lost, but also the version of the world that we've lost. I open social media and see the devastating wildfires displacing hundreds of thousands of people across France, Spain, Canada and the world. And we haven't even hit peak summer yet. There's a term for this even. It's called eco grief. Even here in Puerto Rico, the lush green that I remember looks drier than it used to. The contrast between what was and what is can trigger longing, nostalgia, and an undercurrent of sorrow that leaves us with a sense of unease. And it reminds me, as I mentioned earlier, of Lana Del Rey's Summertime sadness. There's something about that song that captures the strange paradox of caring melancholy through the brightest season of the year and the contrast between sunny summer days and a grieving heart. So I'm calling this melancholic vibe summertime grief. Nearly seven years after losing my brother. What my podcast, my writing, my speaking, and my live gatherings have taught me is to move with the energies, with these shifts, not against them. To build on my last Substack essay, I used the analogy of a ballerina. This time, I'm envisioning something akin to perfecting a pirouette by focusing on embracing the spin while centering yourself amid the pivots, except where they're not nearly as elegant. So think of one ballerina pivots. If she focuses on the twisting and the turning. Or he. It could be disorienting, and you lose your center or your focus. To stay centered, you have to lean into the pivot and embrace it and feel the movement and the part of you that remains steady. Knowing how to return to that center, whether the change is welcome or unexpected is how we begin to reclaim our agency after loss. It's also how resilience and post-traumatic growth begin to take shape. What surprised me the most about this process is that it did not look or feel how I expected. I thought if I quote unquote did the work, whatever the heck that meant, I'd eventually arrive at clarity, peace, and certainty. Instead, it turns out that it looks more like surrender, like relinquishing being with feeling feelings, reframing narratives, physical movement, intentional time in nature. And the one I want to highlight today the most is leaning into life's questions that may never be resolved. Living into the questions is what real key suggests instead of searching for answers. Paradoxically, doing so centers us in times of uncertainty, grief, and solitude. The irony of change and uncertainty is that they create space for possibility. But for someone who thrives in structure. For those navigating foundation shattering loss or those feeling disconnected from their inner compass, this can feel like an abstract, daunting task. In her essay Live the Questions now reading Rilke in a Time of Uncertainty, grief, and Solitude, Pauline Holdsworth writes about Rilke's understanding of grief. She shares this reflection from scholar Ulrich Baer, and I quote. Rilke paid special attention to the transformative power of grief. He talks about how grief pulls you, weirdly enough, out of everyday routines, but it pulls you very deeply into the world, says Ulrich Baer. And this resonated with me. One of life's greatest paradoxes is that the very thing capable of breaking us open can also deepen our relationship with life itself. Lost tears. Our lives apart. Yet when we lean into grief, we find that it has the potential to reassemble us in ways we never could have imagined. One of those ways is through living the questions. And perhaps that's why my next collaboration feels so aligned with where I find myself this summer. For the past several months, my dear friend, author, keynote speaker, podcast host, grief educator all the things Lisa Keefe and I have been exploring questions around curiosity, creativity, possibility, and what it means to continue life after profound loss. Those conversations became the foundation for a new three part series that we're doing live starting tomorrow, July twenty ninth on Substack, and I'll go ahead and link all the information in the show notes. So be sure to look there so you can get the registration links. Together, we'll explore what becomes possible when we embrace curiosity, creativity, and the unexpected. We'll gather thoughtful questions, reflective writing, and a creative practice as we explore what it means to keep living, creating, and meeting life after grief and life's unexpected pivots. Each gathering, as I mentioned before, builds on the one before it. This summer, we're going to pay attention to what shifts instead of resisting them or rushing to make sense of them. Because grief changes us, as do the seasons, and life will continue to shift, whether we welcome it or not. It's that famous expression of the only constant in life is change, so why not get better at it? Our invitation to you is to meet those shifts with heart centered curiosity, a little more compassion, and more trust in ourselves. So if you're navigating grief or a major life shift or longing to reconnect with yourself, then we would love for you to join us. Thank you for being with me for this brief episode, as I mentioned, and as you can tell from this essay, we are in the summer months. It's going to be a bit of a summer slowdown, if you will, before we gear up for season five of the Grief and Light podcast. So I'm so grateful for you to be here. Make sure that you subscribe to the podcast so that you are notified when we have our next release. And join us this summer in Substack. All the links are in the show notes. We'll see you there. That's it for today's episode. Be sure to subscribe to the Grief and Light podcast. I'd also love to connect with you and hear your thoughts and your stories. Feel free to share them with me via my Instagram page at grief and Light. Or you can also visit Grief and Light dot com for more information and updates. Thank you so much for being here, for being you. And always remember you are not alone.