People told me it gets easier with time. I believed them for a while. It seemed like the kind of thing that had to be true, the way a lot of comforting things seem like they have to be true.
But it doesn’t get easier. Not really. You just stop being surprised by it.
Grief, I’ve come to think, is not a phase. Its not a thing you move through and come out the other side, changed but free. Its more like it becomes part of the furniture. You stop bumping into it in the dark because you’ve memorized where it lives. But its always there, in the corner, quiet and patient.
For a long time I thought that meant I was doing something wrong. That I hadn’t healed properly, or hadn’t let go, or whatever the right words are that people use. There’s a whole vocabulary around grief that’s meant to be helpful and often just makes you feel like you’re grieving incorrectly.
You’re not supposed to still think about it. You’re supposed to have found meaning, found closure, found the lesson. As if loss is a classroom and you just need to pass the test.
I don’t think that’s how it works.
What I think happens, what happened to me at least, is that you grow around the grief. Your life expands slowly in other directions. New things come. New people, new moments, new versions of yourself. And the grief stays the same size but you get bigger. So it takes up less of you, percentage wise. Not because it shrinks, but because you grow.
Some days you forget it’s there entirely. You laugh at something stupid and for a second you’re just free. And then it comes back, sometimes gently, sometimes like a hand on the chest. And you realize you hadn’t forgotten, not really. You were just carrying it in a different pocket.
There’s a kind of intimacy to grief that I didn’t expect. It knows you very well. It knows exactly which memory to surface when you’re alone at 2am, exactly which song will undo you, exactly when your guard is down. In a strange way it keeps you connected to the thing you lost. To stay in grief is, in some sense, to stay close.
Maybe that’s why letting go feels like betrayal. Not because you’re weak, but because the grief itself is a form of love. The last form of love you have left to give.
I don’t know when I stopped waiting to be done with it. Somewhere along the way I must have quietly accepted that this is just part of me now. That I carry this person, this loss, this before-and-after, with me everywhere I go.
And oddly, that acceptance didn’t feel like defeat. It felt like something settling into place.
There’s a kind of peace on the other side of that, not the peace of forgetting, but the peace of knowing you can hold it. That you have held it. That you will keep holding it, and still be okay.
Still be here.
Time doesn’t heal grief. But it teaches you how to live alongside it. And sometimes, on the really good days, that’s enough.
Reflections 