Things I Know Now

What grief has taught me that no one else would say.

A year after my husband’s murder, there are things I know now that I did not know before grief.

Not because I went looking for them.

Not because I am wiser than everyone else.

Simply because there are things loss makes impossible not to see.

I know now that when someone dies, you do not only lose the person.

You lose who you were with them.

You lose who you were becoming.

The woman I would have been ten years from now will never exist. She had memories I will never make. Conversations I will never have. Discoveries I will never stumble upon. She had a marriage. She had a life.

She died too.

And some days I grieve her almost as much as I grieve him. Because she would have been witnessed. Fully. By the one person whose seeing made you real to yourself. The woman I am becoming now will never have that. She will become without being known by him. And that — the unwitnessed becoming — is its own kind of loss that has no name.

This is one of the least discussed realities of grief.

The dead are not the only ones we bury.

That does not mean I cannot love her.

But she will be different.

I loved who I was with him.

I loved the life we were building. I loved the assumptions of it. I loved the quiet certainty that we would continue.

Grief has taught me that continuation is not a guarantee.

Only change is.

I know now that we misunderstand grief because we misunderstand loss.

We speak of healing as though grief were a wound.

A wound closes.

A wound becomes a scar.

A wound eventually belongs to the past.

Loss of this magnitude feels much closer to having an arm torn from your body.

No one stands beside an amputee and says, “Don’t worry. It’ll grow back in a few years.”

No one asks when they plan on being finished with it.

No one expects restoration.

They understand adaptation.

They understand that life will continue around an absence.

They understand that something permanent has happened.

Yet somehow we struggle to extend the same understanding to grief.

We ask when people will heal.

When they will move on.

When they will get back to normal.

As though the missing limb were merely misplaced.

I am no longer convinced healing is the right word.

Some things do not heal.

The point is not always to fix.

The point is to carry.

The point is to hold.

The work is building the capacity to remain open in the presence of what cannot be changed.

I know now that grief is an initiation.

Every hero has an origin story.

Every villain has an origin story.

Something happened.

Something split.

Something was lost.

Something has to be integrated.

The event itself guarantees nothing.

The same fire hardens clay and melts wax.

What emerges afterward is the telling.

I know now that we rush far too quickly toward understanding.

Toward certainty.

Toward lessons.

Toward meaning.

As though suffering is required to explain itself.

As though grief owes us a conclusion.

Most transformation does not look like wisdom.

Most transformation is soup.

Dark.

Murky.

Without edges.

Without certainty.

Without a timeline.

There is no way to rush it.

There is only through.

People often tell grieving people how strong they are.

I understand why.

From the outside, survival looks like strength.

From the inside, it feels much more like instinct.

The heart continues beating.

The lungs continue drawing breath.

Morning arrives.

The dog still needs to be fed.

The bills still need to be paid.

The sun rises with a complete indifference to what has happened.

Human beings adapt. It’s what we do.

I am not sure survival is evidence of strength so much as evidence of being human.

And I know now that terrible things do not happen because you are strong enough to handle them.

This is another story we tell ourselves.

A way of creating order where none exists.

The worst thing that has happened to you is the worst thing that has happened to you.

There are absolutely varying degrees of suffering.

Some losses alter the trajectory of an entire life.

Some losses arrive and leave a bruise.

Others arrive and divide time itself into before and after.

But pain is not a competition.

A punch in the face is still a punch in the face.

I know now that we spend an extraordinary amount of energy trying to make meaning out of everything.

Perhaps because meaning gives us the illusion of control.

If we can understand something, perhaps we can survive it.

If we can explain it, perhaps we can contain it.

If we can learn the lesson, perhaps we can move on.

But I have become suspicious of our obsession with understanding.

Sometimes the point of living is simply to be alive.

Not to solve.

Not to master.

Not to transcend.

To experience.

To participate.

To love.

To lose.

To have your heart broken.

To stand in awe.

To laugh until you cannot breathe.

To be changed by what happens to you.

I happen to believe the soul chose this experience.

That it chose a body because experience requires a vessel.

Not because suffering is desirable.

Not because pain is somehow earned.

Simply because to be human is to be vulnerable to loss.

Everything you love, you will eventually lose.

Or it will lose you.

There is no alternative arrangement.

And yet we continue loving.

Perhaps because love is worth the cost.

I know now that love transcends death.

Not as a belief.

As an observation.

Grief itself is evidence.

If love died when the person died, grief would not exist.

The ache remains because the love remains.

The longing remains because the love remains.

The relationship changes form, but it does not disappear.

You do not stop loving them.

You do not move on from loving them.

You do not leave them behind.

You carry them differently.

The closest thing I can compare it to is that they are in another room.

There is a membrane between you.

Thin enough to feel.

Impossible to cross.

Not yet.

No amount of spiritual practice removes the ache of that separation.

Not meditation.

Not prayer.

Not wisdom.

There is a peculiar fantasy that if we become enlightened enough, evolved enough, spiritual enough, we can somehow bypass pain.

We cannot.

Love hurts when it loses its physical form.

That is not failure.

That is the cost of attachment.

That is the cost of having loved at all.

If we begin with the premise that there are things in this life that cannot be fixed, many things become clearer.

There are no words that fix it.

No insight that fixes it.

No action that fixes it.

No amount of hope.

No amount of prayer.

No amount of understanding.

Some things simply refuse repair.

I think this is where we often fail one another.

We live in a grief-illiterate culture.

A culture uncomfortable with helplessness.

Uncomfortable with pain.

Uncomfortable with witnessing suffering it cannot solve.

So we rush toward solutions.

Toward advice.

Toward reassurance.

Toward silver linings.

What grieving people need is often much simpler.

Presence.

Someone willing to stay.

Someone willing to remember.

Someone willing to sit beside the fire without insisting it go out.

Someone willing to show up on the anniversary.

And on a random Tuesday in February.

Because if death teaches us anything, it is that there are no ordinary moments in life.

The way they loaded the dishwasher.

The way they laughed.

The way they reached for your hand.

The excitement of finishing your responsibilities so you could spend the evening together.

The thousand small rituals that quietly become a life.

Death does not make these things important.

Death reveals that they always were.

Loss has taught me strange things about time.

That it is far less linear than I once believed.

That a memory can collapse an entire year into a single second.

That someone can be gone and present simultaneously.

That grief does not move in a straight line because love does not move in a straight line.

And perhaps that is why grief is so different from sadness.

Sadness is an emotion.

Grief is a landscape.

There is never a single loss.

One loss becomes ten.

Then one hundred.

Then one thousand.

The person.

The future.

The routines.

The assumptions.

The version of yourself that existed with them.

The things you would have discovered together.

The stories you would have told.

The questions you never got to ask.

Grief is one of the great multipliers.

And yet, strangely, so is love.

I have learned to be careful of logic.

Not because logic is bad.

Because it has limits.

There are moments when what appears to be logic is actually fear dressed in more respectable clothing.

Fear asking for certainty.

Fear asking for proof.

Fear asking for guarantees before it is willing to trust what it already knows.

I have watched people talk themselves out of their own experience because they could not explain it.

A feeling.

A dream.

A sign.

A moment of connection.

A knowing.

I am less interested now in whether something can be measured than whether it is true.

Love cannot be measured. It cannot be quantified. It is intangible. That is what I mean when I say something is spiritual.

Yet no one who has loved doubts its existence.

Grief cannot be measured.

Yet it can bring a person to their knees.

There are forms of knowing that arrive long before understanding.

I have learned not to be afraid of feelings.

Feelings are information.

Feelings move.

Feelings change.

Feelings pass through.

Numbness is what concerns me.

Not because numbness is wrong. Sometimes numbness is necessary. Sometimes it is mercy.

But a life spent avoiding feeling is a life spent avoiding being fully alive.

The greater danger is often not the feeling itself.

It is the story we tell ourselves about the feeling.

The narrator in our heads is powerful.

Give the same sensation to ten different people and you will get ten different stories.

One story leads to expansion.

Another leads to fear.

Another leads to shame.

Another leads to freedom.

The feeling is only part of the experience.

The story matters too.

I have learned that people are often very bad at helping.

Not because they do not care.

Because they are uncomfortable.

Because they are scared.

Because they want your pain to stop and do not know what to do when it doesn’t.

Sometimes they disappear.

Sometimes they say the wrong thing.

Sometimes they offer advice when presence would have been enough.

Sometimes they make your grief about their own discomfort.

And if you grieve long enough, eventually someone will disappoint you.

Usually several someones.

You will discover who can stay.

You will discover who cannot.

You will discover that support rarely arrives in the shape you expected.

Part of you will be angry about that.

I was.

There are people you want to show up who don’t.

There are people you expect to understand who cannot.

And there are strangers who somehow find exactly the right thing to say.

Grief stretches every relationship.

Some become stronger.

Some break.

Most transform.

And transformation is not always loss.

Sometimes the relationship you thought was gone has simply changed shape.

I have learned that awareness matters.

On both sides.

The grieving and the people who love them.

The question is rarely, “How do I fix this?”

Because often that is impossible.

The better question is, “What is actually needed here?”

Sometimes the answer is a meal.

Sometimes it is silence.

Sometimes it is a text message.

Sometimes it is remembering a date.

Sometimes it is remembering no date at all and calling anyway.

I have learned that nature understands grief better than most people do.

Nature never seems particularly concerned with hurrying.

Nothing blooms because you demand it.

Nothing heals because you are impatient.

Nothing grows because you insist.

The garden does not argue with winter.

The trees do not panic when they lose their leaves.

The mountains remain mountains whether you are heartbroken or not.

There is comfort in that.

Plant a garden.

Get your hands in the dirt.

Watch something grow.

Get a dog.

Walk outside.

Watch what survives a storm.

Watch what returns after a fire.

Watch what emerges from the ground after months of appearing dead.

Nature never promises permanence.

She teaches continuity instead.

I have learned that grief has a peculiar way of convincing people they are forgettable.

That they have become too much.

Too sad.

Too complicated.

Too difficult to love.

This is one of grief’s great lies.

You are not forgettable.

You are not too much.

You are not difficult to love.

You are carrying something heavy.

Those are different things.

I have learned to respect the body.

Perhaps more than anything else.

The body remembers what the mind cannot.

The body knows when it is exhausted.

The body knows when it is frightened.

The body knows when it needs rest.

Feed it.

Move it.

Nurture it.

Be kind to it.

There is a form of violence in demanding that your body perform as though nothing has happened.

And there is a form of love in listening when it tells you otherwise.

If you do not have the energy, respect that.

If you need rest, rest.

If you need movement, move.

Yoga, to me, stopped being exercise a long time ago.

It became a way of saying thank you.

A way of making love to the body that has carried me through things I did not think I could survive.

Loss inflames fear.

Fear wants to make your world smaller.

It wants certainty.

It wants control.

It wants you to stay where it is safe.

Safety is an illusion.

Life continues to ask for participation.

Not recklessness.

Participation.

Do one thing that stretches you.

Then another.

Then another.

Not because fear disappears.

Because life is still happening.

And despite everything, I have learned that life remains worth living.

Not because it is fair.

Not because it always makes sense.

Not because suffering eventually reveals a hidden prize.

Life is worth living because it is life.

Because there is still beauty.

Still coffee.

Still friendship.

Still laughter.

Still love.

Especially love.

And I know now that choosing to remain here — to stay open, to keep loving — is the bravest thing a person can do.

Not because the pain stops.

Because the love remains.

That may be the simplest thing I know.

The love remains.

As long as I am here, it remains.

As long as you are here, it remains.

We become the vessel for it.

The steward of it.

The continuation of it.

The way it keeps moving through the world long after someone is gone.

And perhaps that is why tears deserve more reverence than they are given.

People apologize for them.

Hide them.

Wipe them away.

As though they are evidence of weakness.

I no longer see them that way.

They are jewels.

And grief, for all its devastation, is proof that something real was here.

I know now that love does not end.

I know now that it will always have been worth it.