Fairy Tale, Grief, and the Art of Staying Present
Caregiving at the end of life often brings us to the edge of language. There are moments when explanation no longer helps, when reassurance feels too thin to bear the weight placed upon it, and when grief refuses to organize itself into meaning. A person sits beside the bed through another long night listening to the rhythm of altered breathing, the soft mechanical pulse of monitors, the small sounds that begin to replace ordinary conversation. A cup of coffee cools untouched near the chair. The body remains alert long after exhaustion has already arrived.
What is needed then is often not interpretation, but presence.
This is where image, story, and symbolic form become quietly essential. A fairy tale, approached not as a lesson but as a companion, can help hold what the heart cannot yet speak. In my work, Kevin the Mouse and the Healing Power of Human Tears has become one such companion.
Kevin does not fix sorrow. He does not overcome it. He learns how to remain near it without turning away.
In one brief passage, Kevin sits beside the Unicorn as human tears fall into the earth. Nothing is solved. Nothing is taken away. Yet something essential is being held. The moment does not erase grief, but it changes the loneliness surrounding it. This is the quiet function of symbolic containment: sorrow is not explained, but it is no longer entirely alone.
For many caregivers, this distinction matters deeply. End-of-life care often asks us to remain where we cannot repair, cure, or control. The work gradually shifts from intervention toward accompaniment. A story, a sigil, a mandala, or a remembered image may become a point of orientation when language itself has grown tired.
A sigil, in this sense, is not something to decode. It is something to remain beside. It gathers attention gently inward. It creates a small imaginal space where grief may rest without immediately being asked to transform itself into insight, optimism, or acceptance.
The image does not explain grief.
It keeps grief company.
Fairy tales and epic-poetic forms have long carried this capacity. They accompany human beings across thresholds where ordinary speech becomes insufficient. They allow suffering to remain unresolved while still being witnessed within a larger symbolic field. In this way, story becomes less a vehicle for interpretation and more a vessel capable of holding emotional reality without collapsing beneath it.
This orientation has deep roots within depth psychology, poetry therapy, and imaginal traditions. Carl Jung observed that symbolic images frequently emerge during periods of psychic disorientation or transition, functioning not as explanations but as stabilizing forms. Marie-Louise von Franz described fairy tales as expressions of objective psychic processes unfolding beyond personal intention. James Hillman and Sonu Shamdasani later emphasized that grief cannot always be “resolved” psychologically, because sorrow often belongs not only to the individual but to a larger relational and ancestral field.
Caregiving at the end of life reveals this with unusual clarity. One discovers that love does not always remove suffering. Sometimes love remains beside suffering long enough for it to become bearable.
The caregiver sitting in the dim room at two in the morning may not need another strategy. They may need a story that breathes beside them. They may need an image capable of carrying what language cannot. They may need permission to discover that tears themselves are not evidence of failure, but expressions of attachment, fidelity, and human continuity.
To hold tears is not weakness.
It is one of the oldest forms of care we possess.
And sometimes, after words have exhausted themselves, the work becomes simply this: to remain beside what cannot yet be carried alone.
Selected References
Edinger, E. F. (1992). Ego and archetype. Shambhala.
Hillman, J., & Shamdasani, S. (2013). Lament of the dead: Psychology after Jung’s Red Book.
W. W. Norton & Company.
Jung, C. G. (2009). The Red Book: A reader’s edition (S. Shamdasani, Ed.). W. W. Norton &
Company.
von Franz, M.-L. (1996). The interpretation of fairy tales. Shambhala.
Wilkins, L. E. (2025). The Alchemy of Fairy Tales (Vol. III). Labyrinthian Press.