What it is
Clean grief is grief that’s allowed to be just grief. No story about whose fault it is, no fantasy about how it could have gone, no performance for anyone watching. The pain gets named for what it is, and that’s enough.
It isn’t smaller grief. It’s often bigger, because nothing is getting in the way of feeling it.
How it shows up for me
My instinct is to turn sadness into a project: fix something, blame something, plan something. Clean grief is when I let myself just be sad, and it passes more honestly that way.