This morning… I woke up to two pieces of devastating news from close family members. Two losses, less than twelve hours apart. I have been trying to understand what I feel ever since, and I still don’t think I have the right words for it.
Grief is weird. We all know people die. We know loss is part of life, and logically, we know that no one gets to stay forever. But knowing that has never made it easier when it actually happens. There is something very difficult to process about a person suddenly becoming past tense. Someone who existed in your world, in whatever capacity, is suddenly no longer there, and your brain somehow has to catch up with that fact.
Maybe that is why grief can feel so unreal at first. You read the message again. You hear the news again. You look at a photo. You understand what happened, but some part of you still goes “Hah? Serius?” because I think there is this strange gap between knowing something and actually believing it.
And grief does not always look the way we expect it to. Sometimes you cry immediately. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you feel completely numb and then cry over something completely unrelated hours later. Sometimes you are sad, but still hungry. You still check your phone, answer messages, think about work, laugh when someone says something funny. And then, somewhere in the middle of all that normalcy, you remember again. Oh. Right. They are gone.
I think that is one of the strangest parts of grieving: life keeps happening at the same time. The world does not stop because someone in yours just disappeared. Traffic is still traffic. People are still making lunch plans. There are still deadlines, notifications, meetings, laundry, and things you promised you would get done today. Everything around you looks exactly the same, even when something suddenly feels very different.
Not every grief feels the same either. I used to think grief had something to do with how close you were to someone, and maybe sometimes it does, but I don’t think it is that simple. There are people we speak to every day, and there are people we only see at family gatherings. There are people we haven’t spoken to in months or even years, but somehow their existence still feels like part of the structure of our lives. You don’t actively think about them being there. You just assume they are somewhere, living their lives, existing in the same world as you. Until suddenly they aren’t.
Then memories start showing up in inconvenient ways. Not necessarily the big, important ones either. Sometimes it is just a sentence they used to say, a very specific laugh, a photo you forgot you had, a place, a food, a stupid inside joke. Something completely ordinary that did not mean much yesterday suddenly carries a different weight today. I think grief lives a lot in those small things.
It is not always this huge, overwhelming sadness. Sometimes grief is just a tiny interruption in the middle of an otherwise normal day. A thought that comes out of nowhere. A moment where you almost forget, and then remember again.
There are also so many emotions inside grief that aren’t technically sadness. There is disbelief, anger, regret, confusion, sometimes guilt. Sometimes relief, depending on what someone had been going through. And sometimes there is just nothing. That nothingness can be uncomfortable too, because we seem to have this idea that grief should look a certain way. That if someone mattered, we should be devastated in a visible and obvious way.
But I don’t think our bodies really care about what grief is supposed to look like. Sometimes they cry. Sometimes they shut down. Sometimes they keep functioning like nothing happened until, without much warning, they can’t. There is no neat sequence to any of it.
I also don’t really believe in the idea of “moving on” from grief. It sounds too clean, as if there is a point where you finish grieving and return to who you were before. I don’t know if that point exists. Maybe grief just changes. It becomes less present for a while, then more present again. It can disappear for weeks, months, even years, and come back because you heard a song, opened an old chat, saw someone’s name somewhere, or remembered something completely random.
And when it comes back, it does not always destroy you. Sometimes it just sits there for a moment, enough to remind you that there used to be a person there, and now there isn’t.
I don’t think grief always needs a meaning. It does not have to make us wiser. It does not have to teach us to appreciate life more. It does not need to become a beautiful story about love and loss. Sometimes losing someone just hurts. Sometimes it is confusing. Sometimes it is quiet. Sometimes it feels unfair. And sometimes there is simply nothing useful to say about it.
Maybe that is the part of grieving that is hardest to explain. There is no right way to do it, no correct timeline, no proper amount of sadness, and no clean ending. It can soften, disappear for a while, return unexpectedly, or take on a form you do not immediately recognize.
Someone is gone. You are still here. And somehow, the absence becomes part of the life that continues.
desireenasfhia's 