Pamela Steele on Reframing Grief as a Companion and Learning to Live with Loss
Grief can be a powerful emotion, reshaping a life from the inside out and altering thought processes, feelings, and how one moves through the world. Pamela Steele, PhD, founder of Navigate Grief, brings personal depth and professional clarity to this reality, channeling a perspective that honors grief as something to live with, even embrace, but never dismiss.
Her belief champions a bittersweet truth. There is life after loss.
“Loss is inescapable; we’re all going to experience it,” she says. “Grief resonates with every person in the world. While we’ll all experience it, my main focus is to help people realize that they can still build a life after loss.”
Steele arrives at that conclusion from her own profound journey through grief. She lost her mother, father, and brother within two and a half years, and then her husband, who died suddenly and unexpectedly, leaving her to navigate a world stripped of her anchors. “When my husband died, I was paralyzed,” she recalls. “I was in unfathomable pain. But facing it, and not running from it, showed me that grief doesn’t always destroy you.”
Overcoming those experiences deepened her understanding of pain and shaped the compassion she brings to others. “There are no rights or wrongs when people are grieving,” she adds.
She resists narrowing grief to one kind of loss. Whether someone is grieving a partner, a parent, a job, or a version of themselves, Steele believes that the emotional depth can be similar. “The feelings that one has when they’re in the midst of loss and grief are pretty universal,” she explains. “The degrees will vary, but walking through the forest is going to be the same.” In that context, she emphasizes that no two paths look identical, but the experience is deeply shared.
Much of the difficulty, Steele notes, is exacerbated by expectation. According to her, people are taught, often implicitly, that grief should follow a timeline. She believes that there is pressure to appear composed and to move forward in a way that feels acceptable to others. That pressure isolates people in moments when they most need understanding. “There are too many ‘shoulds’ when it comes to grief,” she says. “This is not an area in which the word judgment is even relevant. People move at different paces, and you have to move with what’s comfortable for you.”
Her own losses have shaped this understanding. They have also reinforced that grief does not disappear. It evolves. “People who have experienced deep loss will always carry that pain with them,” she says. “It just occupies less geography in your heart as your world grows.” Growth, in this sense, makes room around grief.
In the face of that progress, Steele challenges the misconception that moving forward may mean abandonment. She asserts that it is not only necessary but a final act of love that honors the departed by choosing to live fully.
“You have to learn to walk with the grief, honor it, and learn from it,” she shares. “You cannot run from grief. It becomes your companion. Once you face it, the grief changes you. It transforms you.”
Steele offers practical ways to move through them with intention. In her view, speaking about the person who has been lost can keep the connection alive, creative outlets can provide a place for emotions to take shape or express themselves, and structuring the day, even with modest goals, can restore a sense of movement and control.
“The body, too, carries grief. It must be cared for,” Steele says. From her perspective, nourishment, sleep, and breath become even more essential. She recalls how focusing on breathing helped steady her anxiety after the loss of her husband. The people one allows into their space matter just as much. Steele shares how supportive relationships can hold weight, while the wrong ones may add to it.
At the center of it all is self-compassion. Steele notes that many people meet grief with harsh self-judgment, expecting themselves to cope better or faster. She sees this often. “Some of us learn to be hard on ourselves very early on,” she says, pointing to how deeply ingrained that instinct can be. Replacing it with patience, compassion, and grace, she says, is part of the work.
Similarly, assumptions about how someone is coping can create distance instead of comfort. Within that context, she believes that listening, being present, and responding to what is actually needed can carry far more weight than advice.
Even in the heaviest moments, Steele encourages openness to light. “Find those little pockets of joy,” she says. “These moments may be brief, but they matter. They signal that emotional life is still expanding, even in the presence of loss.”
Through Navigate Grief, Steele advocates for more vulnerable conversations around death. Planning for the end of life, she explains, is a gift. Planning reduces the burden on loved ones and ensures that personal wishes are respected. More than that, it changes how people live now. “The more forthright you are about understanding death, medical technology, end of life, and you prepare, the more you can enjoy and relish life,” she says.
Steele’s work ultimately centers on agency. After overcoming her own pain, she now believes that while grief may arrive uninvited, engagement with it is an ongoing choice, one that needs to be intentional and compassionate. She says, “I hope that people will take a deep breath, recognize that moving forward is a choice, as is staying stuck, and that they are worth the effort of taking one small step at a time.”
