The Quiet Ways Grief Lives in Us

Grief is sneaky.

It doesn’t stay put in the moment it began. It weaves itself into the quiet corners of our lives, surfacing in places we don’t expect — a smell, a song, a season, a milestone, or a moment of joy we wish someone else could still witness. People often imagine grief as a storm that eventually passes, but in reality, it’s more like weather we live with — sometimes soft, sometimes heavy, and always part of the atmosphere of our lives.

Grief is something every one of us will eventually meet in our lifetime, not because we are unlucky but because we have loved. For some, those profound losses come early, shaping who we become before we fully understand ourselves. For others, they arrive later, after years of shared history and familiarity. And though every person’s loss is uniquely their own, grief has a way of feeling both deeply personal and strangely universal all at once — the same and not the same, shared yet singular, familiar yet entirely individual.

I lost my dad almost 26 years ago, at the age of 20. I was young in a way I didn’t realize was young until much later — still becoming who I would be, still needing his presence in ways I wouldn’t fully understand until adulthood. His absence has shaped my milestones as much as his life once did: the celebrations he wasn’t here to see, the parenting moments I wish I could ask him about, the subtle ache of knowing who he would have been to my children.

Fourteen years ago, I lost one of my best friends suddenly — we were both pregnant at the time and the grief of their deaths carried layers I didn’t yet have words for. The timing of that loss cut through me differently: grief layered onto a body already growing and protecting someone new. I carried death and new life at the same time. What I didn’t know then was how that collision contributed to a perinatal mood disorder — something I now understand clinically, but at the time only understood as a deep and disorienting emotional unraveling. Even now, there are moments when I can still feel the echo of that loneliness — the “how can the world keep moving?” kind of grief — pressed right up against the tenderness of motherhood.

Grief doesn’t work on a timeline.

It doesn’t expire after the first year. It doesn’t close itself neatly after “acceptance.” Even decades later, it can rise up — not because we’re stuck, but because we’re still connected. Love doesn’t end, and grief is love searching for somewhere to land.

Over time, the pain doesn’t always get smaller — it gets quieter, softer, more familiar. The sharp edges round themselves down, but the imprint remains.

I’ve learned that grief is not a sign that something in us is unhealed — it is a sign that someone mattered. That their life reached into ours with meaning. That something in us still remembers being held, supported, understood, or loved in a way nothing else perfectly replicates.

I think we tend to picture healing as something that removes the ache, but I’ve come to understand it differently: healing means learning to live well alongside the ache. We don’t move on from people, we move forward with the parts of them that remain.

There are still days, even 26 years later, when I feel the absence of my dad intensely — a celebration I want him present for, a question I wish I could ask, a moment where I wonder who he would be today. There are still days when my friend drifts into my thoughts unexpectedly — a laugh I can still hear, a story she should have been part of, a moment of motherhood I wish she had gotten to experience.

Those are not setbacks — they are threads of love.

From a clinical perspective, grief is not something the nervous system “completes” and closes like a task. It is something the brain stores in connection to attachment, memory, identity, and meaning.

That is why it resurfaces. Not randomly, but relationally. When something reminds us of love, we also remember the loss of it.

Some important truths about grief:

• There is no finish line. Healthy grief does not simply “resolve.” It integrates.

• Anniversaries and milestones often reactivate grief — even decades later. This is normal, not regression.

• Grief can resurface during life transitions — especially new seasons of identity (parenthood, loss, children aging, illness, personal growth, etc.).

• You can be healing and still hurting. Those experiences can coexist.

• Feeling grief again doesn’t mean you haven’t moved forward — it means your love is still alive inside you.

  
  

In therapy, we often talk about “continuing bonds” — the idea that grieving well doesn’t mean detaching from the person, but carrying them forward in new ways: in values, in memory, in ritual, in legacy, in how we love others because of how we were once loved.

Grief is not a wound failing to close. It is an attachment continuing to speak.

If you are grieving, whether your loss is recent or decades old, I want you to hear this clearly: nothing about your timeline is wrong. Some loves are lifelong, and so is the ache of their absence.

You are not behind.

You are not supposed to be “over it.”

You are simply human and still loving someone who is no longer here to receive it.

Grief has shaped the way I show up for others. Not because I have “mastered” it or learned how to silence it, but because I have learned how to live with it. It softened places in me I didn’t know would ever open again. It taught me how to sit with pain that has no tidy resolution and no quick fix. The kind of pain that asks for presence, not solutions.

When I walk with clients through their grief, I don’t sit across from them as someone separate from the experience. I sit beside them as someone who understands the quiet reoccurrence of missing. The way grief can feel distant one season and suddenly close again the next. I know the ache of anniversaries that no one else remembers, and the loneliness of grief that doesn’t announce itself but simply rises.

If you are grieving, you do not have to carry it alone. You don’t have to make sense of it or make it tidy or give it an ending.

You simply deserve a place where your love — and your loss — can have space to be seen.

The grief we carry is not a weakness. It is a way of continuing to love in the absence of what we long for. And while the people we’ve lost can no longer walk beside us, we can still keep walking — with them braided into who we are becoming.