When Love Doesn’t Work Out: Grief as a Sacred Teacher

Something you may not know about me is that I come from plain people.

Yes, I’ve become a “fancy doctor lady.” I’ve worked for presidents, earned elite degrees, and built a life that — on the outside — looks polished. But my roots are raw and real.

My mother was a Cuban refugee who spent part of her life on welfare and Section 8. She never got a four-year degree — she was a legal secretary. A simple woman, traumatized by life and failed governments. First the Spanish Civil War, then Castro’s Cuba — both ravaged my maternal line.

On my father’s side, it was no different. My dad never went to college. He was a truck driver, an alcoholic, and a man deeply wounded by his own life. My grandmother — his mother — grew up in backwoods Arkansas, eating squirrel and turtle to survive. My grandfather’s father died when he was a boy, and he was milking cows by age three to feed his five siblings in the middle of nowhere Nebraska.

Poverty is in my blood. Hunger. Grief. Survival. And I’ve carried those aches into every chapter of my life.

Polymathy Behind Bars

With the money my grandparents built through relentless manual labor — my grandfather built homes into his 80s — I bought myself an education.

I earned a doctorate and wrote my dissertation on modern-day polymaths. But during my defense, a professor challenged me: Why didn’t you include the working-class polymath? The mechanic who can fix an engine, tile a bathroom, cook a gourmet meal, and build a computer from scraps?

That critique changed me. I decided to search for human polymathy in non-elite places. And I realized — what better place than prison?

I’d heard that prisons, starved of resources, are full of ingenious acts of creativity and survival. People make art from paper scraps. They innovate with popsicle sticks. They make do — and in that, they reveal a kind of genius.

So in 2020, I began researching.I came across a man in prison who’d built a homemade soldering iron and used it to create a speaker box out of cardboard and wires. His name was Shawn Rodriguez.

A Love Story with the Truth

Shawn’s story stopped me cold. A homeless orphaned teenager who took part in a robbery. No one was murdered. In fact, he stopped a murder from happening. But the court gave him 25-to-life anyway — a sentence reserved for actual murderers.

His story broke my heart. Not just because of him — but because of the systemic rot that made it possible.

And so began my grief work.

America’s Grief: A System That Betrays Its People

I’ve now spent nearly five years researching America’s criminal justice system. And I can say this with confidence:

It’s not a justice system. It’s a law enforcement system. And it is unjust.It is malevolent.It is failing us all.

The U.S. incarcerates more people than any country on Earth — disproportionately poor people, Black people, those with mental illness or addiction. We throw them into cages not because it makes us safer — but because it fuels economic engines. Prisons generate jobs. Prisons create profit. Prisons enslave, legally — thanks to a loophole in the 13th Amendment.

And it has cost us our soul.

The Golden Rule, and the Great Letdown

As a girl in Christian schools, I believed what I was taught: Be of service. Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you. Love thy neighbor.

When I was five, shaking in my boots, I walked to the front of chapel and asked Jesus into my heart. I meant it. And though I’ve been deeply disappointed in organized religion since, I’ve never stopped believing in Jesus. I’ve never stopped believing in love, and justice, and the truth.

That’s why I pursued government. I thought it would be the best place to serve. I worked in government for 15 years. And yes — it was bureaucratic, inefficient, self-serving — but it wasn’t evil.

But America’s criminal justice system is different. It is malevolent. It profits off trauma. It enslaves and destroys, and then protects itself from accountability.

Checks and Balances? Broken.

I’ve tried. I’ve reported misconduct. I’ve filed complaints. I’ve activated the checks and balances our founding fathers envisioned.

They don’t work.

Government protects its own. It buries corruption to keep the illusion alive. And meanwhile, we — the taxpayers — are funding systems that traumatize our own people.

I pay a third of my income in taxes. For this?

Letting the Grief Teach Me

I’ve done something many academics are told not to do: I’ve felt.I’ve cried on camera.I’ve poured time, money, and energy into this work — for free. I’ve spoken the truth on social media, at conferences, in courtrooms.

Because grief has taught me what intellect never could:

Systems can be antisocial too. We can’t keep blaming individuals for failing in a system designed to fail them.

We tell people to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” when the ground beneath them is quicksand. We punish the traumatized instead of healing the trauma. And we wonder why our society is unraveling.

When Love Doesn’t Work Out

Sometimes love isn’t enough to fix a broken system. Sometimes it doesn’t save the people we care about.Sometimes it hurts like hell.

But that doesn’t mean it was wasted.

Love — even when it doesn’t work out — can be a sacred teacher. It reveals what matters. It softens our edges. It cracks us open, so we can rise again — truer, stronger, more aligned.

Grief Can Change the World

I let my heartbreak inform my work. And I will keep doing that. Because grief is holy. And the stories of people like Shawn Rodriguez deserve to be told.

We owe it to each other to build something better.

We need to stop asking humans to behave better while trapped inside systems that are designed to dehumanize them.

We need to feel enough that we are finally moved to act.

Because love — real love — is not passive.

It builds. It disrupts. It grieves. And it transforms.

Let’s let it.