To Grieve is to Live
(Read full Substack essay at https://elizabethlass.substack.com/?r=8bo77r&utm_campaign=pub-share-checklist
To Live Is To Grieve. In the tunnel, on the other side, and why we owe it to ourselves to go all the way through
Some essays inform. Some inspire. This one does something rarer — it bears witness.
Written on the anniversary of her mother's death, Liz Lass opens with a sentence that takes courage to write: I am grateful for my grief. Not as a performance of healing. Not as toxic positivity dressed up in wellness language. But as a hard-won, quietly radical truth earned through years of doing the real work.
What follows is an unflinching excavation of what unprocessed grief actually looks like — not just in one life, but across generations. Tracing a fault line of loss back to a single-engine plane crash in 1962, Liz maps how silence, strength, and the pressure to get on with it moved through her family like an invisible inheritance — surfacing eventually as addiction, disconnection, and pain wearing the costume of personality.
At the center of the essay is a simple but profound metaphor: grief as a tunnel. Dark, disorienting, seemingly endless — and navigable only by walking all the way through. Not around it. Not performing your way past it. Through it.
And on the other side? Not the absence of grief. Something far more surprising: expansion. Tenderness. The capacity to sit with someone else in their darkness because you've survived your own.
To Live Is To Grieve is the essay at the heart of The Eudaemonia Collective — proof that flourishing isn't manufactured in the easy moments. It is forged, slowly and with great courage, in the walking through.
"The other side of grief is love. It has always been love."
Eudaemonia Explained
Eudaemonia isn’t anything new…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrvtOWEXDIQ
Eudaemonia (sometimes spelled eudaimonia) isn't a wellness buzzword — it's a 2,500-year-old invitation.
Rooted in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, eudaemonia is the ancient Greek concept of a life not just lived, but truly flourished — authentic happiness, holistic well-being, and the kind of meaning that doesn't wash off. It is the philosophical foundation of everything we do at The Eudaemonia Collective.
In this clip, we explore what it actually looks like to live it.
→ Watch and tell us: what does flourishing look like for you?