Grief as Access, Access as Grief

What if grief itself was a kind of access need? And what if our approach to access was shaped by the presence of grief, not just in response to death, but to all forms of loss, disconnection, rupture, and change?

For many of us who live with chronic pain, disability, madness, and marginalization, grief is not a season we move through and leave behind. It shapes our days. It informs our bodies. It becomes part of our rituals, our language, our creativity, our care work.

This piece explores the intimate ways that grief and access live inside one another. It asks: what would it mean to create spaces, particularly spaces of collective gathering, that understand grief as a valid, fluctuating, and relational access need?

Access is not just about ramps or captions or rest breaks, though those matter deeply. Access also means space to feel, space to fall apart, space to not explain. It means accounting for the emotional labor of surviving in a world that was not built for us, and still choosing to show up, to create, to mourn, to connect.

Grief itself asks for flexibility, for slowness, for room to not be okay. It disrupts timelines, productivity, and coherence. So does disability. So does madness. These disruptions do not need to be accommodated, they can be honored as integral to the shape of the space itself.

When we begin with grief, we begin with tenderness. We make room for sensory overwhelm, for disorientation, for disappearing and returning. We allow ritual to be soft, imperfect, and incomplete. We stop demanding that people hold it together in order to be welcomed.

Grief as access means designing spaces that expect fluctuation and hold it gently. Access as grief means recognizing how often our bodies, needs, and experiences have been denied, pathologized, or erased, and grieving that together, out loud, in ritual, in witness.

Both grief and access are ongoing processes. Neither is static. Both require care, attunement, and collaboration. Both are about what it means to be in community, not just when we are doing well, but when we are undone.

This is an invitation into that undoing. A creative and collective reimagining of how we gather. A call to let our grief shape our access, and our access make space for grief.