12/20/2025
Beautifully said. Thank you for writing this. ♥️
No one tells you what happens after the tidal wave.
In the beginning, grief is loud. It crashes into you with no warning, taking your breath, your footing, your sense of safety. You can’t eat. You can’t sleep. You can’t believe this is real. The pain is so consuming, you wonder how the world around you keeps moving like nothing happened.
But then—slowly, cruelly—it does. The calls taper off. The texts become fewer. Life around you picks up again… just not yours. You’re left standing in the wreckage, trying to figure out how to live in a world that feels unfamiliar and wrong.
This is the part no one prepares you for.
Because grief doesn’t disappear when the casseroles stop coming or when the funeral flowers wilt. It doesn’t follow a timeline, and it certainly doesn’t care what anyone else thinks you should feel by now. It just… settles in. Quieter. Heavier. Always there.
You start to notice it in small moments. A song on the radio that makes your chest tighten. A familiar scent that stops you cold in the grocery store. An empty chair at dinner that still feels impossible to look at.
Grief becomes less of a storm and more of a shadow. It moves with you. Some days, you almost forget it’s there. Other days, it takes the wheel completely, and you’re back in the thick of it—sobbing in the car, staring out the window, wondering how this is your life now.
The hardest part? The world expects you to be “okay.” But how do you explain that you’re not broken—you’re just forever changed?
Grief doesn’t go away. It evolves. The sharp pain dulls. The raw wound scars over. But it never disappears. It becomes part of you—woven into your story, your laughter, your quiet moments. And strangely, it starts to feel… sacred. Because underneath it all, that pain is love. Real, lasting, life-altering love. And that love deserves space.
So if you’re still riding the waves—some days steady, some days drowning—please know this: you’re not failing. You’re not weak. You’re just human. And this? This is what love looks like when it doesn’t have a place to go.
There’s no finish line in grief. No “getting back to normal.” There’s only forward, one breath at a time. And in that forward, there is space for laughter again. For lightness. For joy.
Not because you’ve moved on.
But because your love is still here. And somehow, so are you.
