“Western culture treats grief like a broken bone,” she says, her voice steady but soft. “We ask, ‘When will you be okay again?’ But grief isn’t a fracture. It’s an amputation. You don’t heal from it. You grow around it.”

“I was teaching people to close doors,” she admits. “But grief kept opening windows inside me.”

“We live in a culture that fears endings,” she says as the interview closes. “But every ending is a secret beginning. Grief is not the opposite of life. Grief is the cost of loving. And love, my friend, is the only power that survives death.”

Her turning point came during a research sabbatical in Oaxaca, where she studied Día de los Muertos traditions. There, she witnessed a grandmother speaking to a photograph of her deceased husband as if he were in the room—not in denial, but in continuity .

For two years, Elena kept her daughter’s room exactly as it was—clothes on the chair, half-colored drawing on the desk. Therapists called it “complicated grief.” Márquez called it “love without a channel.”

Together, they designed a ritual: every Sunday, Elena would move one small object from the room into a new “living altar” in the living room. Not throwing away. Relocating.

For most of her life, Márquez believed grief was an enemy to be defeated. A clinical psychologist turned grief companion (acompañante duelo), she now teaches a radical idea:

Elena now leads art therapy for bereaved parents. “That,” Márquez says, “is the power. Grief becomes a bridge to service.” Not everyone agrees with Márquez’s approach. Some traditional therapists call her “too poetic,” warning that reframing grief as “power” risks romanticizing suffering.