01/03/2026
"Just Deal With It."
In my work — nearly fifty years as a coach, and also as a counsellor — one of the most common things that comes across my desk is not an injured muscle or a struggling athlete. It's a person who is carrying grief. And sometimes the best advice they've received from the people who love them most is: 'Just deal with it.
Three words that are meant to help. Three words spoken by people who love you and have no idea what else to say. Three words that — despite the best intentions — may land like: your pain is inconvenient. Move on.
I've heard it many times in my work. I've heard it directed at people sitting in front of me who were drowning, and the people who loved them had no idea what else to say. So, they said that.
Here's the thing about grief. Everyone does it. There is no human being on this earth who escapes it. The stages differ, the timeline differs, the depth differs — but grief is universal. It is not weakness. It is not a disorder. It is the price of loving someone deeply. And it is worth every single cent.
But grief can stall. And when it stalls, it's almost always because of where it's anchored.
I lost my daughter. She was eleven years old — two weeks away from her eleventh birthday — when cancer took her. So, I am not speaking from a textbook. I am speaking from the gut.
When I returned to work at my gym after her passing, there were moments — a song, a memory, something completely random — and the tears would come. Right there in the gym, in front of everyone. I didn't care. I still don't. Because crying is not just grieving. Crying is also cleansing.
But here's what I refused to do. I refused to let my mind go to the tubes in her veins. The shaved hair. The weight she had lost. I refused to live in those images.
Because that is not who she was.
She was her smile. Her charm. Her maturity that was so far beyond her years it often left me confused and wondering who this kid was! She was the shock — and I mean genuine shock — of a young girl asking to be baptised. And when we questioned her, her knowledge of Christianity and original sin was more advanced than mine. At eleven years old!
That is who she was. And that is where my heart lives every time I think of her.
The turning point for me came when I heard a preacher speak about losing his son to a drunk driver. This man stood at the pulpit, raised his hands, and thanked God for the privilege of being caretaker of His child for twenty-three years. He turned his dead son's life into a celebration of twenty-three years fully lived.
In that moment, something lifted from me that I hadn't even fully realised I was carrying.
That is the reframe. Not don't grieve. Grieve — fully, honestly, without apology. But then ask yourself: what did this person give you? What did they mean to you? What did they bring into your life that would not exist without them?
The intensity of your grief is directly proportional to the depth of the impact they had on your life.
That means your grief is actually evidence of something extraordinary. It is evidence of a life that mattered. A connection that was real.
So when someone you love is stuck — a few months, or even years … still in the dark — don't tell them to "just deal with it."
Ask them to tell you about the person they lost. The real person. The smile, the laugh, what they meant to you, the ridiculous habit that drove them crazy but they'd give anything to see again.
That's how you help someone grieve.
Not by closing it down, but by pointing it in the right direction.
Their person lived. Honour that. Celebrate that. Keep them alive in your stories, your memories, your conversations. Celebrate them!
That is not grief. That is love with somewhere to go.
The Mariolis Method: MOVE.THINK.EVOLVE
If this has touched something in you and you'd like to talk, my door is always open. Reach out privately anytime.
