When we think of grief, we usually think of what is close: a recent death, a relationship that ended, or an absence we can still feel the shape of. But there is an older grief that hums beneath our lives. It lives in our stories, in our bodies, in the histories of our families and cultures. It is the sorrow of generations, passed forward through lineages and peoples, and through everything that was never said out loud or known.
This is ancestral grief. It can be a heavy inheritance, and it can be a source of wisdom we did not expect. Both can be true at once, especially when we are willing to work with it.
Rethinking the Hard Lines We Draw
For many of us, the word "ancestry" brings up genealogy charts, bloodlines, surnames. We were taught to read lineage as a ladder: who came first, who owned what, who belongs. That ladder carries a linear, Eurocentric view of history, shaped by patriarchal and colonial structures. It rewards hierarchy and compliance. It honors academic achievement and forgets the knowing of the spirit and heart. And more recently it honors artificial intelligence rather than ancestral intelligence. And it leaves many people standing outside of it, as if they had no lineage at all: queer people, adopted people, people whose family records were burned, hidden, or never kept.
There is another way to see it. Ancestry as a web of relationship, wide and tangled and alive.
When we loosen our attachments to genealogy and biology as the only measure, a wider and more beautiful language of kinship opens, one that reaches beyond the known familiar. Ancestors come in many forms. Teachers. The authors and poets we keep returning to. Activists, care workers, chosen elders. Animal kin, plant allies, rivers, mountains, the land under your feet.
As ALOK once said: "I believe my ancestors were not people who shared my blood, but were people who shared my loneliness."
The Emptiness of Forgetting
D.H. Lawrence described modern humanity as a great uprooted tree, "with its roots in the air." We are made to be rooted and connected. Yet many of us are living on depleted ground, without the nourishment of memory and story. When we forget myth and mystery, and dismiss our ties to those who came before us, we lose parts of ourselves too.
Many of us carry a quiet emptiness, a loneliness we tend to blame on ourselves, as if it were a flaw in our personality. That emptiness is not a void in you, though. It grows out of how modernity taught us to live: separate, self-made, cut off from spirit, the dead, from the land, from every way of knowing that cannot be measured or seen. What we feel as personal emptiness is a collective forgetting, felt in one body. It is the space where a strange and beautiful otherness was meant to meet us and take up residence within us.
When dreams, songs, seeds, and stories are no longer counted as ways of knowing, life grows shallow. And the soul will not settle for that.
Tending the Tapestry
Tending this disconnection means weaving again: picking up a thread that runs through one lifetime and far beyond it. The weaving is never finished. We pick the thread up, set it down, and pick it up again, and that is part of the practice too.
Honoring ancestors is something people have done in every culture, across every era. It keeps cultural ties alive. It acknowledges the ground our lives grew from.
What this looks like is different for everyone. Here are a few ways in, if any of them speak to you:
You might make an ancestor altar: a small space with photos, names, objects passed down or collected in memory, flowers or plants, a candle.
You might write with questions like: What ancestral grief am I carrying? What stories from my ancestry are wanting to be told, heard, remembered or witnessed?
Or you might sit quietly and let two prompts move through you: “I remember…” or “I imagine…”
You can try one or none. You can come back to it in a year, or not at all. Nothing here needs to be done right or right away.
The Choice Is Yours
Honoring ancestors can feel hard, especially when the recent generations were harmful, absent, or unknown. Turning toward them may stir up fear, anger, or a grief with no name, and that is a natural response.
Sometimes It feels challenging or inaccessible because the invitation to honor can sound like an instruction to forgive, or to make space for what hurt you. It is not that.
And perhaps, what may make this feel more accessible is knowing that you can choose.
You decide whether you are in relationship with your ancestors, how, and with whom. You can welcome back only those who nurtured your being, who coaxed your deeper character into the world, who embodied care and connection. Or you can welcome them all. You can invite them into your circle of healing or ask for their wisdom, while holding clear intentions and boundaries.
Remembering Forward
I believe that ancestral grief is both our disconnection from them, and their loss of connection to us.
Read that again.
Ancestral grief is both our disconnection from them, and their loss of connection to us.
Grief moves in all directions. And so does love.
We are part of an ongoing weaving, a tapestry of many ancestors who came before us, who have shaped and inspired us. We are of them, we are with them and we return to them, and one day others will turn toward us in the same way. One day, we too will be ancestors.
So we dream backward and forward. We tend the living and the dead, who are always near. We tend to the love and memory that lives in our bodies, in our stories, and in the space between us - between the seen and unseen. And, we let these ghosts guide us, as we take our place, once again, in the family of things.
