11/28/2025
🌼 Loss and Continuing Bonds: Grief as a Companion 🌼
In holding more than absence, Maria Panzera Rugg shares how grief lives within her professional life.
✨ “In my professional life, grief is a companion. I have cared and built relationships with many patients, families and communities—children whose lives were short, adults whose stories were unfinished. Each death imprints itself: the story of a parent’s shock, the silence after life support is withdrawn, the expressions of grief in the hands of mourners. Those losses sometimes feel like fractures in my spirit; yet with time, I embrace them as parts of my inner architecture. I keep voice memos, I carry small rituals, I sometimes imagine a patient’s laughter before sleep. Those are bonds I continue, not bonds that trap me.”
Her words remind us that grief can be integrated—not as a weight, but as bonds that continue.
🔗 Read Maria’s full reflection: https://f.mtr.cool/eqvuwevqne
