Article
Change
Death & life
Mental Health
Psychology
4 min read

Letting go and welcoming in

Your new life will cost you your old one. It's OK.

Mica Gray is a wellbeing practitioner working in adult mental health. She is training to be a counselling psychologist.

A family with a mother holding a small child, look up and to the left.
Eduardo Fernando on Unsplash.

Last week my family laid my great-grandmother to rest. A few hours afterwards, we celebrated my cousin's birthday. 

It felt strange to go from a place of death to a place of life in the space of a day. One minute I was throwing flowers into the open grave of a woman whose earthly life has come to an end and the next I was in a restaurant handing flowers to a girl whose life as a woman is just beginning. The contrast was a bit surreal, but much of life is like that; beginnings and endings flowing into each other. The transition between the two events was made easier by the fact that the funeral did not really feel like one. In alignment with my great-grandmother’s spiritual beliefs, the ceremony was very simple. It was over in less than four hours and featured a short reading of spiritual texts and quiet, reverent reflection. There were no solemn looks, no songs of lament, no dirt shoveling, no loud wailing or aunties and uncles dancing to Beres Hammond at the reception. Instead, there was just the quiet nod of acknowledgement that her spirit has journeyed on. 

Though I missed the eulogies and shared tears that usually detail funeral services, I appreciated the simplicity of the ceremony. I appreciated the way death was described as a transition of the spirit into a new kind of life, the way it was treated as something so normal. Which in fact it is. Death is happening around us every day yet as a society it is something that we struggle with - whether it’s the death of a loved one, a career, a relationship or a part of ourselves. Our attempts to curate eternity with anti-aging procedures and technological permanence betray how deeply uncomfortable we are with the inevitability of endings in our modern world.  

And to be honest, of course we are. The loss of loved ones shakes entire worlds. Job losses throw our lives into instability and leave us feeling unsafe. The loss of youth and power challenges long held ideas of identity and invites existential anguish. Divorce carries with it its own special grief. The pain of these experiences makes it hard for us to embrace when things are ending in our lives and make it hard for us to let go, even when we need to.  

And we do often need to. 

What fears, habits, thoughts or behaviours need to be given to the earth? What cycles or patterns do we need to bury and mourn so that we can usher in new and better ways of being? 

Lately I’ve been thinking about the saying ‘your new life will cost you your old one’ and how true that is in many areas of our lives. In my own life, I recently started a new role at work that has cost me the comfort of my old one. I have had to give old versions of myself to the ground and shed skin so that I can continue to grow into the space of it. This new year of doctoral study has cost me Saturdays spent lazing around with friends, new relationships have cost me old patterns of behaviour and new depth in old relationships have cost me pride and ego. 

At each point of transition, I have been asked to leave something behind to experience something new and it seems like so many of us at the moment are being asked to do the same. People are moving houses, leaving jobs, leaving seats of power, churches, ending relationships, wrestling with friendships, forming new ones and experiencing ego-deaths. 

Like my cousin, some people are exchanging adolescence for adulthood. Others, like my great-grandmother, are exchanging their earthly bodies for their spiritual ones. 

In this moment individually, politically and spiritually - it seems like we’re collectively being asked the question: what are we needing to let go of? and then what do we need to welcome in? What fears, habits, thoughts or behaviours need to be given to the earth? What cycles or patterns do we need to bury and mourn so that we can usher in new and better ways of being? 

When life asks us questions like this it can feel overwhelming or intimidating to confront, but it is always necessary. I have found that when you do not allow yourself to grow out of old skin you will suffocate within it. The times of transition that we find ourselves in ask us to trust that something greater is unfolding. They ask us not to resist change but to flow with it. Not to forsake the present or the future by holding on to what has gone to the grave, but to be open to what is next. 

As strange as it was last week to celebrate a birthday after a funeral, it was a reminder that though endings are painful we can embrace them because they usher in new beginnings. It was a reminder that funeral clothes can be exchanged for dancing shoes and that mourning can be exchanged for joy. 

Overall, the day was a reminder that if we make room for it, life can follow death, both in this earthly life, and into the next. 

Selah. 

 

This article was first published on Substack. Follow Mica there.

Article
Comment
Death & life
Justice
Sport
4 min read

Diogo Jota, Thomas Partey, and the right to privacy

Distressing stories show that publicity hinders grief but enables justice
A couple hold each other as they look at floral tributes on the ground
Liverpool manager Arne Slot and his wife at a shrine to Dioga Jota.
Liverpool FC.

Content warning: rape and sexual abuse allegations are discussed in this article. 

It’s Thursday 3rd July 2025 and a friend has just sent a message. “Have you heard the news about Diogo Jota?” 

I love Diogo Jota. Love him. So I assume the worst. The club have sold him. He’s got another of the horrific injuries that have plagued his career. But the news is worse than the worst. 

“He and his brother died in a car accident in Spain,” the message continues. What? Surely not. But shortly afterwards the BBC News notification comes in. Diogo Jota and his brother André Silva have died in a car accident in Spain. 

It is unimaginably tragic news. The incident occurred just two weeks after Jota married his childhood sweetheart. He leaves behind three young children. His brother, André Silva, also recently married his partner in June. It is heartbreaking beyond words and seeing the tributes pour in from colleagues – no: friends – of the players only cements how upsetting a loss this is.  

It’s now Friday 4th July 2025. The day after Jota’s death. Another BBC News notification comes in. Now-ex-Arsenal player Thomas Partey is charged five counts of rape and one count of sexual assault. 

Jota’s death was an utter shock. The news about Partey is anything but. It was the worst-kept secret in football. Everyone knew that he was under investigation for rape. In 2023, the BBC reported that two Premier League footballers continued to be selected by clubs, even “while knowing they [were] under police investigation for sexual or domestic violence.” In January 2025, the BBC subsequently reported that the Crown Prosecution Service had been given “a full evidence file about a Premier League footballer accused of rape.” 

As The Athletic reports, Partey was first arrested in 2022. Between then and being charged in July 2025, he was arrested, questioned by police and then bailed again, seven times. Seven times. All while continuing to play for Arsenal.  

Again: everyone knew that Partey was one of the players in question. Everyone knew. But no-one could say anything.  

And the juxtaposition between the news about Jota and Partey has led me to reflect on the ways in which both stories have (or have not) been reported. I’m almost loathed to mention Jota and Partey in the same breath to be honest. But then that’s the tension underlying all this, isn’t it? Who is given privacy, and who isn’t? 

One man is arrested in 2022 on suspicion of rape and sexual assault. He is afforded over three years of privacy and is permitted to continue in his high-profile, six-figure-a-week-paying job. Another is killed in a tragic accident, and, in the immediate aftermath, his family’s privacy is invaded at every turn.  

Despite Jota’s family clearly and publicly asking for privacy, the media coverage of the tragedy was deeply invasive. The Daily Mail posted pictures of his recently wed wife outside of the morgue having just identified the bodies of her husband and brother-in-law. The BBC – in one of the most tone-deaf acts of journalism I can recall – covered Jota’s funeral. They wrote: “The family has asked for the funeral to be private, but you can follow live pictures from outside the church by clicking watch live at the top of this page.”  

I promise that’s not a joke. Irony really is dead. But the real irony of all this is that this is a deep perversion of how things should be.  

I may grieve with support from other people, but this is fundamentally a deeply personal and private act, not one to be undertaken under the public gaze. Justice, on the other hand, is enacted with the help of a jury of peers and is an act of public peacekeeping and safeguarding.  

It is appropriate for one act to be undertaken privately while the other is conducted publicly. More than this, they are essential to those acts. Privacy enables grief, while publicity hinders it. I can only grieve effectively if given the time and space to do so. By contract publicity enables justice, while privacy hinders it. If justice is enacted in secret, public trust is eroded and the justice system is undermined.  

Grief is private; justice is public. And yet Jota’s friends and family have been forced to grieve with the eyes of the world on them while Partey has been afforded years of luxurious privacy under the auspices of ‘justice.’  

Real violence and harm are done to people when the appropriately private becomes inappropriately public, and vice versa. The news of Jota’s death and Partey’s charging with rape exposes the deeply flawed approach to privacy we have.  

There is no goodness in either of these stories. There are no redeeming angles or silver linings here. They are both deeply upsetting and distressing. But if the stark contrast between the ways they have been reported causes us to reflect on how they ought (or ought not) to be reported publicly, then that will be something, at least. 

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