There are moments in life where the ground shifts quietly, and moments where it splits clean open. Losing both my parents within ten days, nine years ago now, felt like the latter. Even though I had braced myself for the day, watching two people I loved battle cancer, nothing prepared me for how grief actually lands in the body.
It wasn’t the dramatic kind you see in films. It was silent. Cold. A shock that sat under my skin. A sharp, stinging sensation that I still don’t have the words for, the kind that drops you to a place so low you begin to wonder if you’ll ever find your way out again.
I’ve known heartbreak. The slow burn of separation. The ache of relationships ending. But grief… grief is a different creature. It doesn’t just break your heart; it rearranges your insides. It changes the way you hold your breath, the way you move through rooms, the way you look at time. It takes the world you once knew and tilts it by a few degrees, just enough that nothing ever sits in the same place again.
Time itself becomes strange. You keep moving ~ working, loving, functioning ~ but a part of you stays suspended in a moment that no longer exists. And people say things like “time heals,” but what they don’t tell you is that time doesn’t heal for you. It heals with you. Slowly. On the days you least expect it.
Over the years, I’ve realised something: grief isn’t an event. It’s a process. A ritual. A quiet, ongoing conversation between who you were and who you’re becoming.
Some days, you’re pulled back into the shadows without warning, a sound, a scent, a song. Some days, you feel surprisingly steady, like the world is letting you breathe again. And some days, you catch yourself laughing and feel guilty for it, as if joy is a betrayal.
But there’s I’ve learned, gently, over time…
Grief is the clearest proof that love was real.
Its weight can crush you, yes. But its presence also reminds you that you were loved deeply enough to mourn, and brave enough to keep living with the emptiness that love left behind.
And strangely, there’s beauty in that.
Grief actually forces you to look inward, to peel back layers you’ve carried for years, to understand your own resilience, to meet parts of yourself that only emerge in darkness. It makes you soften in places you once hardened, and strengthen in places you once collapsed.
It teaches you that life doesn’t return to “normal.”
It moves you toward a new normal, one built with more awareness, more gratitude, more gentleness with yourself and others.
I’m not fully recovered from losing my parents, and maybe I never will be. Maybe the point isn’t recovery at all. Maybe the point is learning to walk with the loss without letting it define every step.
Grief, when you let it, becomes a compass.
It teaches you what matters.
It teaches you who matters.
It teaches you how short and fragile this entire journey really is.
And somewhere in that understanding, in that soft surrender, you begin to find hope again. Not the loud, triumphant kind. The quiet kind. The kind that whispers:
You’re still here.
You’re still moving.
You’re still becoming.
If you’re grieving, or carrying a loss that feels too heavy to put into words, I want you to know, you’re not broken. You’re human. And the world needs your kind of heart, the one that has known darkness and still chooses to look for light.
