This is a personal essay written by the author, sharing their individual journey and experiences. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this piece belong solely to the author and do not necessarily reflect those of MyndStories. This essay has not been professionally vetted or reviewed for clinical accuracy.
Grief. It is not what they say it is. It is not the loud wailing thing they tell you about. It is quiet. And sneaky. It seeps into spaces between conversations, settling into the corners of empty rooms. Each little pause, the space between two breaths – that is where grief lurks.
It hides in the sound of footsteps that no longer echo along the hallway. But you see its long shadow stretching longer in the afternoon light. You smell it in the old blanket that holds minuscule traces of someone who is no longer there.
Grief is the whisper of a name that nearly rolls off your tongue before you remember there is no one left to answer. It is the spot next to you on the pillow, no longer warm, no longer inviting. It is those unfinished conversations, the things you can no longer say.
It arrives like a tropical storm, threatening to break down your defenses and demanding to be felt all at once. But when its fury passes, it slows into a trickle, its tap-tap-tap wearing down your soul with its weight.
Like when you smell his lingering scent on someone else and are pulled back to a place you can never return to. Like when you walk into a room and swear, for just a second, that you saw him sitting in his usual chair. Like when a familiar song plays, and you feel the weight of absence settle heavy in your chest. Like when you see something in a store and think, he would have loved it, but there is no longer anyone to love it for.
People say time heals. But it doesn’t. It merely rearranges grief into something you can carry, instead of a deadweight around your chest. Grief does not go away. It shifts. It finds new places to settle. It tucks itself behind your ribs, and makes a home inside you.
You learn to live around it. Or you try. You learn to carry the quiet weight of it.
Because grief is not just sorrow. It is love with nowhere to go.
I know this because I have carried it. I carry it still.
The loss came quick like a rumble of thunder cracking open a quiet sky. One moment, there was laughter, love, and movement – the familiar shuffle of feet.
Then, there wasn’t.
The air changed. The walls held their breath. And the house. The house that once felt full and welcoming, stilled.
The ordinary moments of love and grief
People talk about grief in milestones. The first week. The first month. The first birthday that doesn’t come. The first festival where his absence is an empty chair, a dish untouched, a conversation that never happens.
But they don’t tell you about the ordinary moments.
They don’t tell you about the way grief hides in the most unexpected places. In the faint trace of fur still clinging to the couch. In the soft indent on the pillow where he used to curl up. In the silence where a purr once filled the air. In the unopened can of his favorite food, still sitting on the shelf. In the instinct to look for him in his favorite sunlit spot, only to find it empty. In the quiet, heavy absence that lingers where love once purred.
They don’t tell you about the cruel tricks memory plays – how on some days, you can hear his voice clearly. And how, on other days, you struggle to remember the exact sound of his gentle miaows or the precise color of his amber eyes, and the guilt and fear of that forgetting crushes you more than the loss itself.
The thing about grief is that it isn’t linear. It doesn’t move in the neat stages they tell you about. It is not something you ‘get over’. It loops back on itself. Unpredictable. Relentless.
Just when you think you have mastered the weight of it, something random, an insignificant thing, triggers it all over again. A certain song playing on the radio. The smell of rain on your balcony, reminding you of an afternoon you spent together on the swing. A memory your phone brings up under ‘2 years ago’.
People say time heals. But what they really mean is time makes the sharp edges softer. The grief doesn’t shrink. You learn to make space for it. At first, it is an open wound, raw and screaming. Then it becomes a bruise, tender to the touch. And then, one day, it is simply there. It is woven into you like a thread you cannot pull out without unraveling everything else.
I used to think grief was something that had an end. That one day, I would wake up and it would be gone, replaced by only good memories. But now I know better. Grief is guilt. Grief is anger. Grief is denial. Grief is all this. And more.
Grief is love. With no place to go. It lingers on in the spaces he once occupied, in the echoes of his little footsteps, in the absence that becomes its own kind of presence.
Grief reminds me that my Torres was once here. Before I buried his still-warm body in the cold earth. Grief reminds me that, in some way, he is still here.
And so I carry it.
