Grief is strange. One moment you’re making a cup of tea, the next, a song sneaks up on you, and suddenly, you’re back in a moment you can never return to. It’s an uninvited guest, showing up at the worst times, making itself comfortable when you least expect it. Despite what we’re led to believe, grief doesn’t follow a neat arc from devastation to closure. If you’ve ever found yourself talking to someone who’s no longer here, feeling an irrational surge of anger at them for leaving, or wondering who you even are without them, you’re not alone. It’s like trying to walk through your home in the dark after someone has rearranged the furniture—you know the space, but nothing is quite where it should be. We expect grief to be a storm that eventually clears, but more often than not, it lingers like fog, reshaping the way we move through the world.
The ‘Normal’ Parts of Grief Nobody Talks About
We tend to have a scripted idea of grief: sadness, tears, and a gradual journey towards ‘moving on’. But real grief doesn’t fit into a script. It spills over into the everyday, creeping into moments you never expected. It’s waking up and, just for a split second, forgetting they’re gone. It’s laughing at a joke they would have loved, then feeling the gut punch of their absence a moment later. It’s carrying an invisible weight that shifts in size, sometimes crushing, sometimes barely noticeable, but never really gone. And grief isn’t just about longing for someone—it’s about learning to live in the empty spaces they left behind, navigating a world that suddenly feels both familiar and completely altered.
I still think of my grandmother every time I bake. I can hear her scolding me if I rush the process or measure something wrong. It’s been more than 20 years, but in those moments, she’s as present as the flour dusting my hands. I reach for a rolling pin, and suddenly, I’m a child again, watching her knead dough with a patience I’ve never quite mastered. Many people keep these conversations going with their loved ones—sometimes out loud, sometimes in the quiet of their thoughts. Some whisper their names into the silence, hoping for a response they know will never come. It can feel odd at first, like speaking into an empty room, but it’s often a comfort. It reminds us that love doesn’t simply vanish when someone dies; it lingers in the rituals and the echoes of their presence.
Nobody warns you that part of grief might involve being furious with the person who’s gone. It’s illogical—they didn’t choose to leave (or even if they did, the loss was never truly in your control). But that doesn’t make the anger any less real. Maybe they left things unsaid or unresolved. Maybe their absence just feels unfair. It’s like being abandoned mid-sentence, left holding words that will never be heard. But anger doesn’t mean you didn’t love them; if anything, it proves just how much you did. Love doesn’t disappear, but in grief, it shifts into something harder to carry—something with edges that catch and sting when you least expect it. And that’s okay. We are complicated creatures, capable of loving and resenting in the same breath.
Grief isn’t just sadness; sometimes it’s relief, and then the guilt that follows. If someone suffered before they died, you might feel a quiet gratitude that they’re no longer in pain. If your relationship with them was tangled in conflict, you might feel relief that certain tensions are over. But then guilt creeps in, whispering that grief should be pure sorrow, nothing else. Yet, feeling relief doesn’t mean you didn’t love them. It means you’re human. We are wired to seek comfort, to want suffering—both ours and theirs—to end. And sometimes, their release from pain means the beginning of ours, an unfair and painful trade-off that we never agreed to yet must find a way to live with.
When we lose someone, we don’t just mourn their absence—we mourn the version of ourselves that existed with them. Who are we without them? It’s an unsettling question, but an important one. The people we love shape us, sometimes in ways we don’t notice until they’re gone. Their presence influences our choices, our routines, and even the way we see ourselves. And when they leave, it can feel like a part of our identity has been stripped away. It’s like looking in the mirror and finding your reflection slightly altered — recognisable but no longer quite the same. Grieving isn’t just about remembering them; it’s about discovering who we are now, how we carry them forward, and how we begin to reshape our lives in their absence.
Growing Around Grief
Grief doesn’t shrink over time, but we grow around it. That’s a hard truth to accept when all we want is for the pain to stop. But eventually, the sharp edges soften. Grief stops being the centre of our world and becomes something we carry—not in defiance of loss but in harmony with it. We weave it into the fabric of our lives, allowing it to shape us without overwhelming us. And in time, we learn that grief isn’t just about holding onto what we’ve lost—it’s about figuring out how to live in a way that honours what we had.
There’s so much pressure to ‘move on’, but that’s not how grief works. You don’t move on from it; you move forward with it. The people we lose stay with us, not just in memory but in the ways they shaped us. In the things they taught us. In the habits we picked up from them without even realising it. We hear their laughter in the jokes we still tell. We see their influence in the way we comfort others, in the way we take our tea, and in the way we organise our bookshelves just so. Moving forward doesn’t mean forgetting; it means carrying them with us in a way that lets us keep living.
Some days, grief is sharp and raw. Other days, it’s a quiet hum in the background. You might go months feeling fine, and then, out of nowhere, it crashes over you again. It isn’t linear. It shifts, just as we do. Like waves that change with the tide—sometimes gentle, sometimes overwhelming, but always in motion. The loss doesn’t get smaller, but we grow bigger around it, learning how to hold it without letting it break us.
Losing someone forces us to ask hard questions: Who am I without them? What do I carry forward? It’s an uncomfortable, sometimes painful process. But grief, at its core, isn’t just about death—it’s about life. About understanding how we continue, how we evolve, how we shape our world in the wake of loss. And if there’s one thing we learn, it’s this: love doesn’t die with the people we lose. It lingers in the spaces they once filled, in the stories we tell, in the ways we choose to live—not the same, but never alone.