07/06/2026
We are taught to associate grief almost exclusively with death. But the truth is, loss of life is only one doorway into mourning.
Grief is the human response to any profound severing. We grieve broken or lost relationships, the living ghosts of people who are still out there in the world, but no longer in ours. We grieve lost opportunities, the sudden closing of doors we thought we were meant to walk through, and the quiet, painful death of the futures we had imagined for ourselves.
And despite what the world tells us about the passage of time, grief is rarely a linear highway where you simply keep feeling better until the pain is gone. It does not work that way. It is a labyrinth. Years can pass, and you think you have found your footing, only for a random Tuesday to pull the rug out from under you. A sound, a scent, or a sudden quiet can bring back a wave of grief so raw and visceral it leaves you gasping for air, feeling exactly as you did on day one. Time changes how we carry it, but it does not erase the weight.
Perhaps some of the heaviest, hardest grief to carry is the kind born from what we cannot understand. When a loss defies logic, when it breaks the rules of fairness we carry in our minds, it creates a unique kind of agony. It is a profound exhaustion, trying to survive a reality that your heart simply cannot understand or accept.
Grief is not a problem to be solved or a phase to be outgrown. It is a construct to work within. It is simply the price of caring deeply about things, and people, that we cannot always keep.
