Grief Has No Graduation Day

There is a strange expectation placed on grieving people.

At first, everybody understands.

People call.

They check in.

They bring food.

They tell you not to worry about anything.

Then life begins moving again.

For everybody.

And eventually, sometimes without anybody actually saying it, you begin to feel as though yours is supposed to move in the same way.

But grief doesn't work from a calendar.

There is no ceremony where somebody hands you a certificate and says:

Congratulations. You have successfully completed missing this person.

You can be doing better and still hurt.

Those things can exist together.

You can laugh again and still grieve.

You can have a beautiful day and suddenly wish they were there to see it.

You can go months without crying and fall apart because you heard a song in the supermarket.

You can build a life around a loss and still find yourself missing someone on an ordinary Tuesday.

That doesn't necessarily mean you are going backwards.

It means something mattered.

Grief changes shape.

In the beginning, grief can occupy almost every room.

Over time, other things may move back in.

Work.

Friendship.

Dinner.

Laughter.

Birthdays.

Plans.

Ordinary nonsense.

Life gets bigger around the grief.

But bigger doesn't mean the grief disappears.

Sometimes it sits quietly in a corner.

Sometimes it walks right into the middle of the room again without knocking.

Anniversaries can do it.

Smells can do it.

A voice that sounds almost like theirs.

A recipe.

A photograph you forgot existed.

A piece of news you instinctively want to tell them before remembering.

Grief has terrible manners that way.

You don't have to defend a difficult day.

If today hurts more than yesterday did, you don't have to explain why.

You don't need an anniversary.

You don't need a trigger you can identify.

And you don't have to say:

“I should be over this by now.”

Over where?

There is no finish line.

There is simply learning, slowly and unevenly, how to carry love when the person, relationship, place, future or version of life connected to it is no longer available in the way it once was.

Do something that lets the grief exist.

Not everything needs to make you feel better.

Sometimes you need somewhere for the feeling to go.

Say their name.

Cook something they loved.

Write down the story you are afraid you'll forget.

Play the song.

Tell somebody, “I'm missing them today.”

Sit quietly.

Cry if crying comes.

Don't cry if it doesn't.

There isn't a correct performance of grief.

And please don't measure your healing by how rarely you remember.

Remembering isn't failure.

Missing isn't failure.

Having a life that contains joy again isn't betrayal either.

You are allowed to carry both.

Some losses become part of the architecture of a life.

We learn where they live.

We learn which doors are tender.

We learn that sometimes we can walk past them easily and sometimes we need to sit beside them for a while.

There is no graduation day.

There doesn't have to be.

TDC gentle next step:

If somebody or something is especially present in your mind today, write one sentence beginning: “What I miss today is…” You don't have to make the sentence hopeful.