I think one of the hardest things about being human is having to learn how to live with things we never imagined we would lose.
We talk about grief as though it is something that only happens when someone dies. And while death is one of the most painful forms of loss, grief is not exclusive to it. Sometimes, we grieve people who are still alive, relationships that no longer exist, opportunities we never got, versions of ourselves we can no longer recognise and even the lives we thought we would have by now.
Grief is a response to loss, but I don’t think we talk enough about what that loss does to a person.
It is not always crying, withdrawing from people or spending days in bed. Sometimes, grief looks like someone going about their normal routine, showing up at work, responding to messages, laughing at jokes and doing everything they are expected to do. Yet, somewhere beneath all that normalcy, something has changed.
And perhaps that is what makes grief particularly difficult to understand. It does not always announce itself. Sometimes, it quietly becomes part of a person’s everyday life.
Grief can change the way people think, how they relate with others and even how they see themselves. It can make a previously outgoing person withdraw, make someone who was once emotionally available become distant, or leave a person struggling to find joy in things they once enjoyed.
Sometimes, it affects concentration, sleep, appetite and the ability to make even the simplest decisions. There are days when the smallest things feel overwhelming, and there are moments when an ordinary conversation, a familiar smell, a song or an unexpected reminder can bring back emotions someone thought they had already dealt with.
And no, healing is not always a straight line.
People sometimes assume that once someone has stopped crying, started going out again or returned to their responsibilities, they have moved on. But functioning is not necessarily the same as healing. Being able to carry on with life does not mean the loss no longer hurts.
There is also the uncomfortable expectation that people should grieve in a particular way. We want grief to have a timetable. We want people to cry for a while, take some time, find closure and eventually return to who they were before. But what happens when they don’t? What happens when the person who experienced the loss is no longer quite the same person?
Perhaps we need to understand that not every loss comes with closure, and not every grieving person knows how to explain what they are feeling.
Sometimes, people don’t need advice. They don’t need to be reminded to be strong, told that everything happens for a reason or pressured to find the positive side of a painful experience. Sometimes, they just need room to feel what they feel without having to justify it.
I also think we need to become more considerate of the people around us. We never really know what someone is carrying. The person who seems irritable might be struggling. The friend who has become unusually quiet might be grieving. The person who no longer shows up the way they used to might be trying to make sense of a life that suddenly looks different.
Grief is deeply personal. Two people can experience the same loss and respond to it in completely different ways. There is no universal formula for it, and there certainly isn’t a deadline for getting better.
Maybe the most important thing to understand is that grief is not simply about missing what we have lost. Sometimes, it is about learning to live in a world that no longer looks the way we expected it to.
And perhaps healing isn’t always about getting back to the person we were before the loss. Sometimes, it is about slowly learning to live with the person we have become.
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