Grief Is Not One Moment

We often talk about grief as if it happens in a single moment. The moment your person stops breathing. The moment everything changes.

And yes, there is that moment.

But grief does not end there.

Sometimes grief begins long before death, when someone is sick and you watch them slowly fade. You grieve while they are still alive, quietly and privately, while still hoping and loving at the same time.

Then there is the immediate aftermath. The days when people show up with food and texts and love. When you are carried, because you cannot stand on your own yet.

And then, slowly, they return to their lives.

Their normal.

And you are left with yours.

Grief does not leave when the casseroles stop coming. It stays. And it is not only grief for the death itself. It is grief for the life you believed you and your person would have together.

My son William died when he was nine years old.

Before he died, I never questioned that he would live a long, full life. That he would outlive me. That one day, far in the future, he would be the one putting me to rest.

I imagined him going to high school. Driving a car. Dating. Making mistakes. Finding his people. Maybe going to college, maybe not. Building a life that felt like his.

I believed I would witness all of it.

And then he died.

At nine.

So I grieve not only the boy I lost, but the man he never got to become.

I grieved him when he should have gone to high school, five years after his death. I grieve him now, as his peers get their driver’s licenses. I will grieve him on graduation days. I will grieve him when Kai gets married. I will grieve him when Bodhi has a child of his own.

I grieve that William will never get to experience those things. And I grieve that he is not here to witness his brothers’ lives unfold.

This is what grief actually looks like.

It is not neat. It is not contained. It does not run on a timeline.

And yet, our culture keeps trying to give it one. Three months. Six months. A year. As if there is a point when we should be done, when we can put it away and move on.

I recently read a novel where a man loses his child, descends into grief, and then three weeks later hits a turning point and feels much better.

Three weeks.

That kind of storytelling does such a disservice to grief. It teaches us that pain has an expiration date. That if you are still hurting too long, something is wrong with you.

There is nothing wrong with you.

I will cry every December 20th, the day William was born. I will cry until I die.

Not because I am broken.Not because I have failed to heal.

But because love does not disappear when someone does.

Grief is not one moment. It is a relationship that keeps changing shape as we move through life without the person we lost.