THE GIANT THIS WEEK
The Grief Giant is not always who you think he is.
We recognise him when he arrives at funerals. When he sits beside us in hospital waiting rooms. When he comes for the people we love and leaves us standing at gravesides wondering how the world can possibly continue turning at its normal speed when something this large has just stopped.
That grief is real. And it is important. And it deserves every tear it produces.
But there is another kind. The kind that has no funeral. No flowers. No one checking in three months later to ask how you are doing. The kind that arrives quietly — in a radio presenter's voice, in a number on a screen, in the slow realisation that a future you had been building toward is not coming.
That grief is just as real. And it is almost never spoken about.
This week we speak about it.
THE SPARK
I want to tell you about a moment I have never spoken about publicly until now.
I was at work. Years ago — well over two decades. And I was thinking, the way driven people think when their minds will not stop working even when their hands are busy — about a business idea that had been forming inside me for weeks.
It was a good idea. I knew it was a good idea the way you sometimes just know — not arrogantly, not with certainty about the outcome, but with the particular clarity of someone who has looked at a problem from enough angles to see that the solution they have found is real. I was going to build something that reduced the need for paper. Electronic pads with e-pens. Devices that could replace the notepad, the printed page, the endless consumption of trees for the sake of words that could just as easily live on a screen.
I was building the business plan in my mind. Expanding it. Testing it against itself. Feeling the particular excitement of an idea that is growing faster than you can contain it.
And then the radio presenter's voice came through.
IBM. Same idea. Already done.
I want to try to describe what happened in that moment — not the practical consequences, which were immediate and obvious, but the internal experience. Because it was not simply disappointment. It was something more specific than that. It was the feeling of a floor giving way beneath something you had been standing on. The sudden absence of ground under an idea that had been, for those weeks, as real to me as anything physical.
I did not tell anyone how much that moment cost me. I folded the business plan up — not literally, but internally — and I carried it. Quietly. The way you carry something when you do not have a place to put it down and no one has offered to help you hold it.
That is the grief that does not have a name. The grief of the idea that was real before someone else made it real first. The grief of a future that existed completely in your mind and was taken from you before it ever had the chance to exist anywhere else.
I have lost people too. My father. Grandparents. Uncles and aunts. None of those losses were easy. All of them were difficult in ways that are still with me. And I grieved them — imperfectly, privately, in the way that men of my generation were taught to grieve, which is to say not very well and not for long enough. But I grieved them. The world gave me a structure for that grief. A funeral. A period of mourning. A language for what I was feeling.
The other grief — the grief of lost dreams, lost futures, lost money, lost versions of the life you were building — the world gives you nothing for that. No structure. No language. No permission to feel it as deeply as it actually sits.
And so you carry it. Alone. In silence. In the place inside you where the things you cannot say to anyone live.
I know that place well.
The largest grief of that kind — the one that sits heaviest even now as I write this — came later. The financial loss. The investment account wiped to zero. The dreams that had been attached to that money, that future, that version of what was possible — watching them go with it. Not just the money. The hope the money represented. The freedom it was supposed to unlock. The proof it was going to provide — to myself, to the people around me, to the voice inside that had always questioned whether I was capable of building something real.
Only Carol knows the full weight of that. To this day. Not because I am ashamed of having been deceived — though the shame was there, heavy and persistent, wearing the particular face that financial failure wears when you are a man who believes his worth is connected to his ability to provide. But because I did not know how to hand it to anyone else. Because the world does not have a structure for that grief either. No one sends flowers when an investment account reaches zero. No one asks how you are doing three months later.
You just carry it.
And here is what I have learned about carrying grief in silence for long enough. It does not dissolve on its own. It does not lighten with time unless time is accompanied by the deliberate, courageous act of acknowledgement. It simply sits. And it shapes things — quietly, invisibly, in ways you do not always notice until you look back and see the decisions you made, the risks you avoided, the dreams you did not pursue, because somewhere underneath everything the ungrieved loss was doing its quiet work.
David wept. That is something we do not talk about enough when we talk about David. The warrior, the giant-slayer, the king — he wept. Fully, publicly, without apology or embarrassment. In the Biblical tradition, grief was never the opposite of strength. It was part of it. The man who could not grieve was not considered strong. He was considered incomplete.
There is something in that tradition that modern men — and I include myself in this — have lost. The permission to feel the loss fully. To name it. To sit with it long enough for it to tell you what it actually is before you fold it up and put it somewhere internal and carry it forward into the next thing.
I am not fully there yet. I want to be honest about that. The financial loss still lives somewhere inside me — quieter now, less haunting than it was, but present. What has changed is not that the grief has gone. What has changed is that I am no longer pretending it is not there. And I am no longer alone with it — not just because Carol has always known, but because I am choosing, in this newsletter, to say it out loud.
That choice — to stop carrying something in silence and instead to name it, even imperfectly, even incompletely — is itself a form of release. It does not fix the loss. It does not rewrite the past. But it ends the particular exhaustion of pretending the weight is not there.
And something else has changed too. The future that the financial loss seemed to cancel — the freedom, the proof, the version of myself I was trying to become — that future is not gone. It has simply arrived differently. Not through an investment account managed by someone who wore faith like a costume. But through this. The writing. The newsletter. The book. The mission of helping others face their giants.
This future does not require me to rely on anyone else's promises. It is built entirely on the stones I already have. And it will not only compensate for what was lost. It will exceed it — in meaning, in fulfillment, in the particular satisfaction of doing something that helps other people find their way through their own grief and their own giants.
The grief is real. And so is what grows on the other side of it.
That is not a platitude. That is what I have lived. And I believe — completely, with everything I have — that it is what you can live too.
YOUR STONE THIS WEEK
Name one thing you have been grieving in silence. Not the grief the world gave you a structure for — the funerals and the acknowledged losses. The other kind. The dream that did not happen. The money that did not return. The future that was cancelled before it began. The version of yourself you were building toward that had to be put down.
Name it. Write it in one sentence. You do not have to show it to anyone.
Just stop carrying it in the place where the things you cannot say live. Give it a name. Give it the acknowledgement it has been waiting for.
That is not weakness. That is the beginning of the grief that finally heals.
The Giant is waiting. Pick up the stone.
— Cassius Stone