The Grief That Doesn’t Have a Timeline

One of the hardest things about grief is that it doesn’t move in a straight line.

You can feel okay for weeks, maybe even months, and then suddenly something small knocks the wind out of you. A song. A smell. A date on the calendar. Someone saying something that lands in the exact wrong place.

And then there it is again. Grief is not something we finish. It’s something we slowly learn how to carry differently.

So often, people feel pressure to be better by now. To make peace with it. To talk about their loss in a way that feels polished, wise, or wrapped up. But real grief is usually messier than that. It can live in the body, in the nervous system, in the way we brace for more loss, in the parts of us that don’t fully know how to feel safe again.

This is part of why I believe grief work has to be gentle. Not forced or rushed. Not turned into a project where you have to “release it all” and become some brand-new version of yourself overnight.

Sometimes the work is noticing what your body is still holding. What your heart has not had space to say. What beliefs may have formed in the quiet aftermath of loss.

Maybe grief taught you that everything good gets taken away.

Maybe it made you feel like you have to stay guarded.

Maybe some part of you still feels frozen in the moment life changed.

Healing doesn’t mean erasing the love or the loss. You don’t stop missing them. It means your system gets more room to breathe around what happened.

And sometimes, that is enough for now.

P.S. The photo above is of my mama holding me when I was little, maybe around one or two. I lost her in 2009.

My grief journey with her has never been simple. She had a massive stroke when I was 18, and in a lot of ways, that was the first loss: grieving the mom I knew, while she was still here, and learning how to live without her in the ways I still deeply needed. Then, ten years later, she died. It was grief layered on grief.

This healing work has helped me move through so much of what I carried. I can look down at my hands and see hers without falling apart. I can hear “Landslide,” the song played at her funeral, without needing to change the station. I can move through the holidays with more softness. I can think of her and smile, laugh at memories, and feel connected to her in a way that doesn’t only hurt.

I’ve built a different relationship with her in death. It’s been hard and beautiful and complicated and healing.

And damn, I still miss her every single day.