Hospicing the World: How Grief Can Guide Activists Toward Liberation

Hospicing the World: How Grief Can Guide Activists Toward Inner Liberation

Grief is a strange companion. It sneaks up when you least expect it—stalking quietly in moments of joy, settling into the cracks during moments of rage. For activists, grief becomes a constant presence. As we fight for change in a world hellbent on destruction, we are repeatedly reminded of how much is lost—species disappearing, land exploited, communities and family-lines erased. Grief sits with us in the streets, it lingers in meetings, and it can become so heavy it threatens to turn passion into despair. But what if grief, rather than being something to push aside, could instead guide us? Could it be the key to finding liberation within ourselves, even as the world burns around us?

Grief is more than sadness.

Most people think of grief as something that happens after a loved one dies, but the work of activists requires a different type of mourning—one that acknowledges both the personal and the collective. As Martín Prechtel writes, “Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.” Activists miss a lot. We mourn the loss of connection to the land, the absence of justice, the silence of those who should speak up but don’t. And we mourn the future that could have been, a future we work so hard for but may never see.

Yet, what if we reframed grief as a compass? It tells us what matters. We grieve for what we love, and in that grief, there’s the invitation to dig deeper into that love, into that sense of purpose. When we allow ourselves to feel the full spectrum of this emotion, to sit in it rather than trying to rush through, we find clarity. What we love is worth fighting for, and what we grieve is an invitation to act. It's in that sorrow that we can find our most radical selves.

Hospicing the world isn’t about giving up.

Activists often carry the unbearable weight of trying to save everything. And in that, there’s a temptation to lose sight of the smaller, intimate liberations that are happening all around us. But what if, instead of trying to save everything, we shifted our focus to 'hospicing' the world?

To hospice something is to offer care and compassion at the end of life, but not with the goal of staving off death forever. The intent is to ease the transition—being there through the pain, offering presence in the inevitable, and finding meaning even in decline. For activists, this shift can be radical. We are not here to save the world in some grand sweeping motion, (this after all, is a colonial white supremacist archetype of the savior). We’re not saving, we’re helping guide through its transformation, and that transformation includes death. The extinction of species, the collapse of systems, the crumbling of harmful structures—these are deaths that need to happen. Our role is to help usher them in with dignity, even as we grieve what is lost.

I’ve worked with many activists who find themselves at a crossroads after burnout. One in particular, a climate justice organizer, came to me after stepping down from her work. She told me, "I feel like a part of me has died, and I don’t even know what to do with myself anymore." She was grieving—grieving not just the state of the world, but the loss of her activist identity, her sense of purpose. Through our work together, she learned that her grief wasn’t an obstacle; it was a teacher. In mourning what she had given up, she rediscovered what truly mattered to her, not as a slogan or a cause, but in her body, in her heart. By processing her grief, she found a new way of engaging with the world, one that didn’t require constant sacrifice, but rather a gentler, more sustainable way of being present. And through this, she was liberated from the need to save the world.

This doesn’t mean resignation. It doesn’t mean apathy or defeat. Instead, it’s a deep acknowledgment of cycles—death and rebirth, pain and liberation. We are the ones holding space for the world to transition into something new, something yet unseen. Rebecca Solnit says, “Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky... Hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency.” Hope, and grief, are tools we use to break through to the other side of this global Empire collapse.

Grief as a path to inner liberation

There’s an unexpected freedom in this perspective. When we stop trying to win every battle, when we acknowledge that we are not responsible for fixing every broken piece, we liberate ourselves from the suffocating pressure that activism can bring. In this liberation, we find room to breathe, to rest, to reflect. This isn't to say we stop working, but rather we begin working from a different place—a place rooted in love and grief, not in obligation or desperation or reaction.

Bell Hooks teaches, “Love is an action, never simply a feeling.” Grief, too, is an action. When we allow ourselves to grieve, we are taking the action of caring deeply. We are saying, "I see this loss, I honor it, and I will move forward with it as part of me." This action becomes a radical form of self-liberation, because we no longer need to numb ourselves to the endless cycle of loss. We integrate it. We learn from it.

There’s also a quiet truth in knowing that not everything is ours to carry. Activism is often framed as a war, but what if it’s more like a garden? Some things will wither no matter how much we tend to them. Other seeds, though, will grow long after we’re gone. We may never see the full blossoming of our efforts, but that doesn’t make them less important. To hospice the world is to care for what is, while knowing that what will come may not look anything like we imagined. Grief opens us to the possibility that liberation is not just something out there, but something within.

Moving forward with grief, not against it

We are living in a time of unprecedented loss. Species, languages, cultures, ecosystems—they are all disappearing, being annihilated by colonialism at alarming rates. And it’s easy to feel that we are fighting a losing battle. But grief teaches us that loss is part of the process. What if, instead of resisting it, we leaned into it? What if we let our grief guide us to a place of deeper connection, to our purpose, to each other, and to the earth itself?

In this way, grief becomes not a burden, but a doorway to inner liberation. It is an invitation to let go of the things we cannot control and to focus on the small, deliberate actions that honor what we love. It allows us to find beauty in the midst of destruction, to recognize that even in death, there is a sacredness worth tending to. And in doing so, we free ourselves from the suffocating need to 'win.'

We are not here to save the world, but to hospice it through its transition, to care for it deeply even as it changes beyond recognition. And in that caring, in that grieving, we find our own path to freedom.