by Brian D Smith | Grief Guide and Healing Journey Podcast Host
A Place For Us In short, personal reflections, Brian D. Smith shares thoughts on everyday living — on love, loss, presence, uncertainty, gratitude, and the quiet moments that shape us. <br/><br/><a href="https://grief2growth.substack.com/s/a-quiet-place?utm_medium=podcast">grief2growth.substack.com</a>
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Publishing Since
12/31/2024
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July 9, 2026
<p>Ask me where my wife is right now. I’ll get it right, down to the couch cushion.</p><p>Ask about my daughter Kayla, and I’ll get that right too. Her drive to work. Her Tuesday. I don’t have to think about it. I just know.</p><p>But when Shayna passed, when I asked myself “Where is she?”, my brain glitched. It returned a “that does not compute.”</p><p>Researcher Mary-Frances O’Connor’s describes it this way: we build a map for the people we’re attached to. Not a metaphor. An actual neural map, running underneath everything else. It tracks the people we love along three lines: space, time, and closeness. Where they are. When we’ll see them again. The tighter the bond, the more detailed the map.</p><p>That map is active right now, in all of us, for everyone we love. It’s why you can feel your spouse in the next room without looking up. It’s why you know, without checking a clock, that your kid is at practice until 5:30. The map does this work silently, constantly, in the background of an ordinary day, so quietly you never notice it’s there until it breaks.</p><p>Here’s the problem when someone we love passes.</p><p>The map doesn’t shut off. It doesn’t get the memo. It keeps generating the exact same predictions it always has, for a person who is no longer where the map insists they should be.</p><p>Six o’clock comes. The map expects the sound of the door. The door doesn’t open. The map doesn’t know what to do with that. So it runs the prediction again. And again. Not because you’re irrational. Because the map is doing its job. It just doesn’t have the one input it needs: an update it was never designed to receive.</p><p>That’s the part nobody prepares you for. Not the sadness, though there’s plenty of that. The malfunction. The part of your brain built specifically to locate the people you love, spinning, searching, coming up with nothing, over and over, for months, sometimes years.</p><p>That’s why we write books called Finding Him. Looking for Her. Why the entire language of grief sounds like a search party. Why so many of us feel, quite literally, lost. We’re not choosing that word for effect. Lost is the most accurate word available.</p><p>We’re not being poetic when we say that. We’re lost, and the oldest part of the brain, the part that has nothing to do with logic or belief, is still checking coordinates that no longer exist.</p><p>The brain can’t find her in space or time, so it returns ‘nowhere.’ We can’t accept that answer. So it runs the search again.</p><p>“Nowhere” was never the right answer, and it was never true either. It was just the only answer the map could give while it was still looking in space and time.</p><p>She’s not nowhere. She’s everywhere.</p><p>She’s everywhere I put my attention. Wherever I stand, if I look for her, she’s already there. In the kitchen. In the car. In the middle of a sentence I didn’t finish.</p><p>That’s not denial, and it’s not a nice story I tell myself to feel better. It’s just where the map points now, once you stop asking it to find a single location and start letting it find her everywhere at once.</p><p>The door still doesn’t open at six. But I’ve stopped waiting for it to. I look somewhere else now, and she’s there too.</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://grief2growth.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">grief2growth.substack.com/subscribe</a>
July 6, 2026
<p>The Sheep Detectives. I almost didn’t see it.</p><p>The trailer played in the theater one afternoon before whatever I’d actually come to watch, and I remember thinking it looked silly. A flock of CGI sheep solving a murder. Hugh Jackman, of all people, playing a shepherd. I filed it under “not for me” and forgot about it.</p><p>Then my friend Susanne Wilson told me she’d seen it. She said it was really about the continuity of life.</p><p>That stopped me. Because that’s the one subject I can’t walk past.</p><p>So, this afternoon, I watched The Sheep Detectives. And I was wrong about it in the best possible way.</p><p><strong>Spoiler warning:</strong> I’m going to give away some of the heart of this film below. If you’d rather go in fresh, watch it first, then come back. I’ll be here. I won’t tell you whodunit. I wouldn’t want to ruin that fun for you. It’s still a fun detective movie, even with these spoilers.</p><p><p>Table Of Contents</p><p>* <a target="_blank" href="https://grief2growth.substack.com/i/205407645/a-childrens-movie-thats-secretly-about-death">A Children’s Movie That’s Secretly About Death</a></p><p>* <a target="_blank" href="https://grief2growth.substack.com/i/205407645/the-comfort-of-theyre-in-a-better-place">The Comfort of “They’re in a Better Place”</a></p><p>* <a target="_blank" href="https://grief2growth.substack.com/i/205407645/the-trick-that-nearly-breaks-the-flock">The Trick That Nearly Breaks the Flock</a></p><p>* <a target="_blank" href="https://grief2growth.substack.com/i/205407645/the-one-sheep-who-couldnt-look-away">The One Sheep Who Couldn’t Look Away</a></p><p>* <a target="_blank" href="https://grief2growth.substack.com/i/205407645/why-grief-is-an-act-of-remembering">Why Grief Is an Act of Remembering</a></p><p>* <a target="_blank" href="https://grief2growth.substack.com/i/205407645/planted-not-buried">Planted, Not Buried</a></p><p>* <a target="_blank" href="https://grief2growth.substack.com/i/205407645/what-would-you-refuse-to-forget">What Would You Refuse to Forget?</a></p></p><p>A Children’s Movie That’s Secretly About Death</p><p>On its surface, this is a whodunit. George the shepherd, played by Jackman, reads detective novels aloud to his flock every night, assuming they can’t understand a word. He’s just enjoying time with his sheep, whom he loves. Then, one morning he’s found dead in the pasture. The sheep, grief-stricken and armed with everything George’s mystery novels taught them, decide to solve it themselves rather than leaving it up to the bumbling policeman in the town.</p><p>It’s rated PG. It’s marketed to families. Reviewers call it charming.</p><p>But underneath the cozy mystery is something far more tender. This is a movie about how a flock refuses to face loss, and what that refusal costs them.</p><p>Craig Mazin, who wrote The Last of Us, gave these sheep a theology. They don’t believe sheep pass away. They believe that when a sheep is gone, it simply becomes a cloud. No one dies. Death is just a construct in the nighttime stories that George tells them.</p><p>Look up. There they all are. Drifting. Safe. Never really gone, never really here.</p><p>It’s a coping mechanism with a huge cost, which I recognized instantly.</p><p></p><p>The Comfort of “They’re in a Better Place”</p><p>We do the same thing.</p><p>When someone we love passes, we reach for the softest possible language. They’re in a better place. They’re watching over us. They’re a star now, a cardinal, a cloud.</p><p>Some of that comes from genuine belief, and I hold it myself. I’ve spent decades studying evidence for the continuation of consciousness. I’m not here to take anyone’s comfort away. Just the opposite.</p><p>But some clouds are just avoidance dressed up as comfort.</p><p>It’s the story we tell so we never have to stand in the pasture and admit that someone is gone from our arms. The cloud lets us skip the ache. It lets us keep grazing.</p><p>The sheep aren’t wrong that something continues. They’re wrong that they can love without ever looking at the loss.</p><p></p><p>The Trick That Nearly Breaks the Flock</p><p>Here’s the part that really got to me.</p><p>The sheep have an ability, and it’s more dangerous than the cloud myth. When something painful happens, they can decide together to simply forget it. A whole flock, agreeing to look away. The hard thing dissolves, and the grazing continues.</p><p>It sounds like mercy. Who wouldn’t want a button that deletes the worst times of your life?</p><p>But the film understands something most of us learn the hard way. You cannot forget selectively.</p><p>When the sheep erase the pain of losing one of their own, they also erase the sheep that passed. The name. The warmth. The way that one stood a little apart from the rest. All of it goes, because you cannot reach into a life and pull out only the sharp parts.</p><p>The good and the painful are braided together. Cut one and the whole thing unravels.</p><p></p><p>The One Sheep Who Couldn’t Look Away</p><p>But one sheep can’t play along.</p><p>His name is Mopple, a Merino ram who never forgets a thing. While the rest of the flock wills itself into that merciful blankness, Mopple holds it all. Every face. Every loss. The whole history of the meadow, including the ones who are gone.</p><p>He remembers his mother. He carries what no one else will.</p><p>For most of the film, that looks like a curse. He’s the one who aches while everyone else goes numb. He bears the weight of memory alone so the flock can keep grazing in peace.</p><p>Sound familiar?</p><p>In almost every grieving family, there’s a Mopple. The one who won’t let the loss be tidied away. The one who says the name at the dinner table after everyone else has gone quiet. The one accused of “not moving on,” when really they’re just refusing to trade a person for a cloud.</p><p>If that’s you, hear this. What looks like being stuck is often love that simply refuses to look away. You’re carrying something precious for people who aren’t ready to hold it yet.</p><p>And here’s where the film lands. In the end, Mopple tells the flock the truth he’s been holding all along. It’s our memory that keeps the ones we love alive. What looked like a burden was really love, still doing its work.</p><p>The man who directed this understood that firsthand. Kyle Balda lost his own mother suddenly at twenty-three, and by his own account, he sprinted through the first year without ever stepping into the grief. He forgot the anniversary of her passing entirely, then felt like a monster when he realized it. He put himself into this film to say what he wished someone had told him: we forget because remembering is terrifying. But this is not the way through.</p><p></p><p>Why Grief Is an Act of Remembering</p><p>This is the heart of what I teach, and I’ve never seen it dramatized quite like this.</p><p>We treat grief like a wound to be closed. Get past it. Move on. Stop dwelling. As if the goal were to feel less, to remember less, to finally set it down.</p><p>But grief is the proof that you loved well.</p><p>To grieve is to keep remembering. To keep saying the name. To let the good memories and the hard ones sit at the same table, because they came from the same person, the same unrepeatable life.</p><p>The flock’s tragedy is that they’d rather feel nothing than feel everything. And we can’t choose to feel some things. It’s nothing or everything. And in choosing to forget, they don’t just lose their grief. They lose their loved ones a second time.</p><p>I’ve held people in my coaching work who arrived wanting the same thing the sheep wanted: to stop hurting. And what they discover, almost every time, is that they don’t actually want the memories gone. They want the memories to stop being only pain. Those are very different requests.</p><p></p><p>Planted, Not Buried</p><p>My whole philosophy lives in three words: planted, not buried.</p><p>I’ve learned that the love and the loss grow from the same soil. I keep Shayna’s picture on my desk, on my watch, in the foyer of my home. I keep her close on purpose. Forgetting her to spare myself the ache would cost me the joy of her too, because the ache and the joy grow from the same root.</p><p>Shayna is still my daughter. Remembering her fully, the laughter and the longing both, is how I keep her present rather than trading her for a cloud.</p><p>Her angelversary was just a week ago. I woke up, and the first feeling I had was anger. It hurt. But the only way to avoid that would be to not remember. </p><p>That’s the choice the sheep finally face. To remember is to hurt. But to remember is also to keep loving. You don’t get one without the other. So instead of choosing to forget George, their beloved shepherd, they finally choose to remember.</p><p>So can we.</p><p></p><p>What Would You Refuse to Forget?</p><p>If you could press the flock’s button, if you could forget your deepest loss and feel nothing at all, would you?</p><p>Most of us, when we sit with it honestly, wouldn’t. Because the memory is the love, and love was the whole point all along.</p><p>Kyle Balda finally stopped running from his mother’s memory. That turn is beautifully expressed by Kyla in this film. A man choosing, at last, to walk back into the grief he’d once sprinted past. He remembers his mother now. So did Mopple for everyone who passed from the flock. So do I, every single day.</p><p>Go watch The Sheep Detectives if you get the chance. Bring your kids if you have them; the mystery is fun, and the ending earns its place. But watch it as an adult, too, and notice what those sheep are really teaching.</p><p>Then tell me in the comments: what’s one memory you’d never trade away, even though it hurts to hold? I read every reply.</p><p>And if this reached you, share it with someone standing in their own pasture right now. They may need permission to remember.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Brian D. Smith is a grief guide, certified grief educator, and host of the Grief 2 Growth podcast. After losing his daughter Shayna in 2015, he has dedicated his work to helping others find evidence-based hope in the face of loss.</p><p><p><strong>📣 Join the First 100 — Founding Member Rates</strong></p><p>Substack promotes its bestsellers. Bestseller status helps me reach people who are hurting and don’t yet know this community exists. You can help get me there.</p><p>72 of 100 seats are filled. 28 remain. </p><p><strong>Click the tier to sign up</strong></p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://grief2growth.substack.com/67746561">💛 </a><a target="_blank" href="https://grief2growth.substack.com/67746561"><strong>The Lightbearer</strong></a> — $2/month ($20/year) You believe this work matters. That’s enough.</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://grief2growth.substack.com/328bb6e6">💚 </a><a target="_blank" href="https://grief2growth.substack.com/328bb6e6"><strong>The Steady Hand</strong></a> — $4/month ($40/year) Present, consistent, quietly holding space.</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://grief2growth.substack.com/ebf18833">💙 </a><a target="_blank" href="https://grief2growth.substack.com/ebf18833"><strong>The Shoulder-to-Shoulder</strong></a> — $6/month ($60/year) Walking beside those who are carrying the most.</p><p>After year one, your subscription renews at the standard rate — cancel anytime before then. No penalty. No guilt.</p></p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://grief2growth.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">grief2growth.substack.com/subscribe</a>
June 14, 2026
<p>There’s a door you’re afraid to open, and even more afraid will come bursting open. You know the door I mean.</p><p>It’s the one at the top of the basement stairs. You crack it open, look down into the dark, and shut it fast. Because something down there is rattling, and you’ve learned the hard way that if you go down, it pulls you under.</p><p>So you keep the door closed. You stay up here in the light, where it feels safer. You reach for the next good thing, the next distraction, the next reason to keep climbing toward something better. But the rattling never stops.</p><p>If you’re grieving, you have a basement like this. I do. The fears that come with grief don’t show up in the open. They live down there.</p><p></p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://grief2growth.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">grief2growth.substack.com/subscribe</a>
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A Place For Us
In short, personal reflections, Brian D. Smith shares thoughts on everyday living — on love, loss, presence, uncertainty, gratitude, and the quiet moments that shape us. <br/><br/><a href="https://grief2growth.substack.com/s/a-quiet-place?utm_medium=podcast">grief2growth.substack.com</a>
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