Almost everyone tends to “flatten” what they don’t understand. They simplify it because it’s unfamiliar or contradictory to their expectations.
They take something vast and layered — a city, an experience, a person, a loss — and compress it into something easier to grasp. It’s not always malicious; sometimes it’s self-protection. Other times it’s just expedient. Simplicity feels familiar and safer than the raw edges of what is misunderstood.
When I left Detroit, I noticed how easily people “flattened” their understanding of the motor city. Detroit was “ugly, gray and broken” — all crime, no beauty. They totally ignored the grandeaur of the Fisher Building, the significance of the two doors on the Hitsville studio, the determination and love of Mother Waddles, glorious Belle Isle and irreplaceable Indian Village. Detroit has layers upon layers.
The Evolution of Grief
I’ve learned that the same reflex shows up in grief, especially in the long aftermath of violent loss. Early on, people lean toward platitudes because they can’t bear the silence, the emptiness, the unfairness. Later, they shift to impatience — assuming time should have “done its job by now.” But later, when healing takes a form they don’t expect, when a survivor begins to laugh again, or finds meaning in an after-death communication, or rebuilds life in unconventional ways — onlookers often shrink it down to “explain” something they understand.
It’s what the human mind does with the unfamiliar, with mystery: it tries to make it smaller and more two-dimensional.
But the survivors I’ve met over the years — remarkable, ordinary people who never asked to join this club — have taught me grief doesn’t want to be solved. It wants to be witnessed. It wants space to unfold in its own shape and time. Healing, when it comes, isn’t about closure or forgetting — it’s about expansion.
Post-Traumatic Growth
That’s what post-traumatic growth really is: the widening of the soul to hold both the horror of what happened and the tenderness that somehow still lives inside us. It’s learning to live in contradiction — to feel joy while missing someone fiercely, to honor a life cut short by daring to live ours fully.
When we refuse to flatten grief — when we stop insisting it make sense or fit someone else’s idea of “moving on” — we find a surprising kind of peace. The loss doesn’t shrink. We grow larger around it.
So when someone looks at Detroit and sees only decay, I remember the music, the grit, the warmth, its history while never forgetting it is where my husband’s life was taken. And when people hear about after-death communications and rush to label them “coincidence” or “imagination”, I know they’re doing what humans do: trying to feel safe in the face of mystery by flattening it.
But familiarity isn’t the same as truth.
Like it or not – we are all shaped by things we can’t explain. We’re shaped by beauty that catches us off guard, by losses that reorder our hearts, by moments that blur the line between this world and whatever lies beyond.
If I’ve learned anything from survivors — and from my own long walk through grief — it’s that we heal not by understanding everything, but by letting mystery be part of the experience. It is what it is.
By refusing to flatten what we don’t know, we give life its full, layered dimension again. When we remain open to the unknown of what lies ahead in our evolving grief we grow larger, more compassionate and more connected. It’s not detachment; it’s depth. We’re no longer prone to mistake noise for meaning. Grief stretches our perspective, quiets our vanity and roots us in what really matters. We become more grounded. And in doing so we become part of the mystery, too.
