On Grief
‘illustration by my mom’
In the beginning, none of it feels real.
One minute, I’m seated in a restaurant with colleagues at a department lunch, the air filled with a cheerful din. The next, I answer a call on my cell phone. In hindsight, I can’t remember if it was my father or the paramedics I was speaking to—the only thing I was certain was that something had changed.
If you’ve lost someone, a parent, sibling, relative, or even a close friend, you know your own version of a story like this. Something that once felt vivid but has grown uncertain for me. Robbed of subtle details as time moves on. When I lost my mother suddenly in 2013, it marked one of those moments where life becomes permanently divided.
There is the before and the after. The during—the event itself, the source of this loss—is something I struggle to understand, even though much time has now passed.
I’ve started and stopped writing this very essay for so long the document feels like it’s grown roots in my computer. I’d write a few more lines and then inevitably stop. It’s not just that the right words are hard to find—it’s the feelings that the words bring. And there’s a quieter fear too: if I speak openly about it now, am I allowed to speak about it again? Or does naming it once mean that’s it?
I don’t have a theory about grief. I only have the experience of it. But I’ve felt a quiet obligation to write about it. Not because I’ve figured it out, but because so few people do.
We all know, even without saying it aloud: everyone we love will die. As the poet Philip Larkin put it, almost flippantly, “All that’s left to happen is some deaths (my own included) …”
And yet, that inevitability doesn’t prepare us.
I’ve spent more than a third of my life being formally educated. But neither our education system nor society prepares us for what it feels like to grieve. To cope with the loss of a constant in our lives.
When it happens, we speak honestly of it in hush tones. Often only with the ones who shared in the loss. Or with a stranger, a therapist, someone whose distance makes them safe. Someone trained to let us pour our rawest emotions into the open. But it’s in the space between, among the people we spend most of our time with, that grief struggles to find a place.
What can you say to someone who is grieving? We’ve all found ourselves in this scenario, knowing that our presence or our words, might bring comfort. But the right words, any words at all, feel just out of reach.
There’s a worry that what we’ve felt, what we’ve been through, may not translate to someone else’s grief. And in some ways, it’s true.
This is what makes grief so elusive.
Grief is both foreign and familiar.
Foreign because nothing truly prepares us for it. When it arrives, it feels like being dropped into a world where nothing makes sense, where words fail and even time moves differently. Familiar, because loss is woven into life itself. Even before we experience it firsthand, we’ve seen it in others. In childhood, we saw it play out in stories. Bambi’s mother. Mufasa’s fall. The empty spaces left behind in books and movies. The way people soften their tone when they say, “I’m sorry for your loss”.
It lays bare our relationship with the person we lost, and with the others who knew them. And it does this all at once and over time. Grief almost feels like water in that way. Flooding, receding, finding new cracks. Disappearing for a while, then showing up somewhere unexpected.
In some ways, looking back, the beginning, raw and tragic as it is, may be the easiest. The village rallies. Food overflows the fridge and pantry. The house fills with relatives and friends. People who had a connection to the person you’ve lost. Their presence, their stories, their laughter, and their tears seem to hold the space. Filling the gaps that loss would otherwise leave. For a short while, it feels as though they’re not quite gone.
Some find it easier to accept this outpouring of support than others. Immediately after my mother passed, so many wonderful people reached out. Offering support, or just to listen. But I didn’t take them up on it. Not because I didn’t appreciate it, but because I didn’t know what it would require of me. What I would even say. What I, as a man, was supposed to need. Or not need. I didn’t yet have the language for the weight I was carrying, let alone know how to hand any of it to someone else.
And in fairness to myself, I had this hope that I would wake up the next day, or the one after and feel normal again. In these failings, I know I am not alone.
This middle-part of grief is often the hardest. The logical side of us, our brain, wants it to be linear. Something to get over or through. Society wants that too. There are reports to turn in, deadlines to meet, goals to achieve. The same company that sent flowers and a card signed with heartfelt messages is also waiting (patiently but waiting) for you to move on. To return to who you were. To be productive again.
It’s not just society and organizations. It’s hard to know where others are in this journey. Whether they need a helping hand, or space to be alone.
You spot them a few aisles over. Someone who’s suffered a loss.
Maybe you sent condolences when it happened. Maybe not.
This is the first time seeing them face-to-face.
You hesitate.
Has too much time passed to say something?
Would mentioning it be a relief?
Or would it only remind them of what they’ve been trying to hold back?
It’s a small moment, but it contains all the confusion of grief.
What to say.
What not to say.
Whether presence is enough, or too much.
I wish I had answers to any of this. But I’m still searching too. In fact, the only thing I’ve begun to understand is that grief isn’t really meant to be understood. It exists to be felt.
And I also think that the extent to which we are able to understand it, can only come from feeling it.
That isn’t to say that therapy, books, or reflection aren’t valuable. They can help us name our pain, give it structure, and make sense of something that doesn’t always make sense. But grief doesn’t live in the mind alone. It settles in the body. In the way we carry ourselves. The tightness in our chest or muscles. In the exhaustion we can’t explain.
Some of us (including myself) may have believed, at one time or another, that if we could just understand grief well enough, we could move past it. As if knowledge might spare us from feeling it again. But grief doesn’t follow logic. It doesn’t resolve when we decide we’re ready.
Twelve years ago, I felt as though I grieved for my mother. And maybe I did. I sat with my family and cherished our memories of her. I did the rituals, felt sadness and I cried. And in a lot of ways, I moved on.
But I’ve come to realize:
Some parts of grief don’t show up right away.
Not every part arrives at once. Some of it waits until we’re ready. And some of it never really leaves. It lingers.
And not just as a memory of who we loved, but sometimes as a reminder of how we lost them. Of the illness, the suddenness, the circumstances we couldn’t change. That part hurts. But it belongs to the story too. And part of my journey has been realizing that it stays with us, whether we speak of it or not.
I have many beautiful memories of my mom. As the years pass, I feel an ache that time will continue to soften some of the clarity and texture of them. Her voice. The comforting words.
What I know won’t fade is the unconditional love and support she gave me. Until the very end. She knew the substance of me. And she knew that I would find a way to go on.
