The year I turned 35, my mother died, my marriage ended and I moved out of the home I shared with my spouse. Within eight months, everything that had once seemed permanent was gone. I had never grieved so intensely before.

My initiation into grief had seasons: after my mother’s death in early spring, I tried holding my emotions at bay by working too much, keeping a strict routine and studying books on loss. It was easier pretending my body was a machine than letting myself slow down long enough to feel. Grief made me guarded and sometimes numb. As a polyamorous person active in queer leather and kink communities, the erotic was an important part of my life. That spring, I still had sex and went to play parties, but I was more protective of who I let in. I didn’t know how to navigate an inner landscape so fraught with obstacles, let alone invite someone else to explore it with me.
 

My marriage barely survived the summer. It wasn’t my mother’s death that did us in. It was how grieving sapped the emotional reserves I needed to keep pretending everything else was fine. Part of how I had learned to be a wife was by shrinking my needs into shapes tiny enough to hide under my tongue. I didn’t doubt our love for each other, but it was getting harder to see a future where my spouse and I both could thrive.
 

By fall, I still clung to the hope we might salvage our marriage. I should have known it was over by how unwilling I was to entrust my grieving body to my spouse. I fucked friends in dungeons and let one pierce a row of needles through the thin flesh over my heart. With them, I could be permeable. At home, I kept my vulnerability hidden behind walls. Grief had punctured any lingering illusions I had about our marriage as a place where I could safely be my whole self.
 

We broke up a few days before Halloween. I spent my last night in our apartment on the couch, untouchable.
 

Kink and sex were integral to my identity, community, relationships and aliveness. Yet in the depths of grief, I turned inward, instinctively drawn to celibacy and platonic intimacy. Unburdened by any expectations of returning to “normal,” I gave my grieving body a safe place to rest for the winter and spring. It was as if something in me knew to wait until summer, when the most intense BDSM scene I’d ever experienced would help me come to life again. 
 

I spent my first winter of grieving cocooned in a stranger’s rented apartment. While a woman I found on Craigslist went on a three-month backpacking trip with her boyfriend, I made her bed into a flannel nest where I always slept alone. Her big grey couch became an island of blankets and pillows where I drank tea with friends or cry-watched episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. I wrote in my journal and meditated every day—which sometimes looked like sobbing face-down into the carpet. I cooked a lot of soup.

I didn’t consciously choose celibacy that winter so much as it chose me.

Before my marriage ended, the erotic had been central to my life, identity and relationships. I found solace in it, even while grieving my mother’s death. Sex and play were an important means of connecting with, and caring for, myself and others. Many of my closest relationships had their roots in queer leather and kink communities, where it was common to share sexual or erotic experiences with friends and acquaintances.

Grief had eroded the boundaries between me and the world.
 

Yet when I suddenly found myself burdened with multiple losses—mother, marriage, home—I felt shockingly vulnerable. It was as if grief had eroded the boundaries between me and the world. My feelings were big, leaky and unpredictable. Everything was in flux, especially me. In the past, I’d had a tendency to dive headlong into new relationships, swept up by romance, and to say yes to all sorts of sexual adventures. But grieving made me want to hide under a soft thick blanket.
 

Grief educators Michelle Williams and Rachelle Bensoussan define grief as “an involuntary response to loss … that happens in our bodies without our consent or participation and impacts us on all levels of our being and personhood—physically, emotionally, cognitively, socially, sexually and existentially.”
 

When I decided to take a break from sex, dating and kink, I was following an instinct to make space for all the ways grief had unsettled me and my life. It wasn’t that I wanted to cut myself off from other people. It was that I needed to prioritize my relationships with myself, and with the friends who had supported me through my mother’s death and every loss that followed.
 

I needed to fall apart in trusted hands before I could open myself to sexual, romantic or erotic intimacy or purposefully push my physical and emotional limits in play. I didn’t know it then, but I was creating my own version of a mourning practice that temporarily allowed me to step out of the life I’d known before loss.
 

Psychotherapist Francis Weller, who authored the book The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, likens grief to a descent into the underworld, a time out of time in which our “primary work is digesting sorrow.” In some northern European cultures, writes Weller, “the season of grieving the loss of someone close was known as a period of living in the ashes.”
 

That first winter of grieving was my season of descent. Nourished by the rich darkness of long nights, warm soup and the company of friends, I allowed myself to mourn, held safely within the boundaries of a body that wanted only gentleness and freedom from expectations.

Spring returned. I marked the first anniversary of my mother’s death in March.
 

I started waking up again in April. The rhododendrons and camellias on my block were bursting into life, and each warm spring day was longer than the last. I was ready to shed the heavy shroud of grief I had been wearing so as to feel the sun on my skin.
 

That month, I spontaneously said yes when a friend invited me to join them and a few others at an upcoming leather conference in California. I had never been before but had heard stories of its legendary outdoor dungeon, where nearly naked queer kinksters played freely in the desert heat.
 

Six weeks later, I stepped off the plane in Palm Springs with a sheer black bodysuit and retro pink swimsuit in my bag. My friend met me at the airport and drove us to the mid-century-modern house we had rented for the weekend.

“How are you feeling about the conference?” they asked, knowing all of the unravellings I’d lived through since my mother’s death the previous spring.

“Nervous. Excited. Ready, I think? I don’t really know what to expect.”

I watched from the passenger seat as we zoomed past palm trees, taquerias and low-slung adobe-coloured strip malls. Our surroundings were just different enough to feel strange, but the newness was exciting, not scary. I took it as a sign I was ready to leave my grief cocoon, at least for the weekend.
 

The conference, which went from Friday to Sunday, was held in a modest one-storey hotel built around a central courtyard. We had the whole space to ourselves. Enclosed by walls, it was private enough to do whatever we wanted, shielded from the hubbub of everyday life. I was tentative the first night, content with being a voyeur. On Saturday, I shook off my nerves in a lighthearted scene with two friends whom I’d played with before. With them, I could embody my desires as a menacing-yet-playful femme top. Our dynamic, which gave me greater control over my experience, provided the guardrails I needed to be erotic with others for the first time in nine months.
 

I had fun with my friends, but our scene left me yearning to go deeper. I wanted to challenge my limits, to push up against someone powerful enough to hold all of me. I wanted to lose control. Only through submission could I shed the composed facade I’d taken to wearing in public since last spring. Underneath was something wilder, messier and longing to feel alive. As grievers, we sometimes internalize the idea that we’re too much, that we ought to tamp down our unruly feelings lest they spill all over everyone else. We might feel pressure to move on or go back to “normal,” even if there’s no such thing anymore. Part of the beauty of my season of descent was creating a space in my life where I didn’t feel obligated to pretend.

On the last day of the conference, I was reminded of how kink could be a refuge for my grief too.
 

The tall blond woman and I had cruised each other the night before. She was a motorcycle-riding leatherdyke, ferocious sadist and experienced top. We had never played together but we had been at some of the same parties and had friends in common. I had seen her in action enough times to know that she was fearsome, powerful and devastatingly hot.
 

I was nervous on Sunday as I approached where she was lying by the pool. Offering myself to her felt vulnerable. I knew what unfolded between us wouldn’t be soft and easy. I couldn’t remember the last time I had wanted so badly to submit to someone.
 

“How are you feeling?” she asked as I perched at the foot of her chaise longue.

“I feel like I should swallow my gum,” I confessed.

“You should,” she said, “because I’m going to kiss you.”
 

That kiss kicked off a 10-hour marathon of fucking and fighting. She claimed my mouth, then every other part of me. Growling, I came at her like an animal. I may have wrestled for control, but we both wanted her to win. I had never played so hard in my life, held expertly in the grip of a woman whose desires were as ferocious as mine.

Gone was my composed facade, replaced by feral hunger. I gave my body over to her like an offering, feeding us both. We played for hours; my sense of time burned away in the heat storm of our desire. There were slow and reverent moments, and tender ones too. The primary energy between us was that of two powers colliding. Together, we became something larger, her dominance meeting my submission with a kind of alchemy that showed me I was even stronger than I knew.
 

It was dark out by the time we finished playing, a scene that ended with me almost naked on the ground. I was covered in bruises with grass in my hair and dirt up my nose. When I looked up, I saw the woman who had guided us through this experience standing over me, and a desert sky full of stars. I was in awe of their beauty, and I could tell she saw the beauty in me too.
 

I went home feeling elated, like I had gone through a physical, emotional and spiritual trial and come out transformed. I didn’t call it a grief ritual, but it was. If the winter had been my season of descent, that night in the desert was my initiation back into the world.