At the age of 24, I became a widow.
Nobody handed me a manual. Nobody sat me down and told me what grief would feel like, how long it would last, or what I would do because of it. I learned most of it the hard way, alone, in a house that suddenly felt too quiet.
Since then, I’ve walked with a lot of people through their own losses. And I keep hearing the same thing: “Nobody told me it would be like this.”
So let’s talk about it. Here are five things no one tells you about grief – and why knowing them might change how you move through it.
- Grief isn’t just about death.
You can grieve a divorce. A diagnosis. A job you loved and lost. A friendship that quietly ended. The version of yourself you thought you’d be by now. The child you didn’t have, or the parent who’s still alive but isn’t who they used to be.
Grief shows up anywhere something that mattered to you is gone.
Why it matters: If you’re only expecting grief after a funeral, you’ll miss it everywhere else it’s living in you. And you’ll wonder why you feel this heavy over “something that isn’t that big a deal.” It is a big deal. Name it as grief, and you can finally start tending to it instead of just white-knuckling through it.
- It doesn’t move in neat stages.
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. You’ve probably heard of the five stages. What no one tells you is that grief doesn’t walk through them in order, check them off, and then you graduate. You might experience more than that, in a different order and more than once. These are things you might feel at some point as you grieve.
You’ll feel acceptance on a Tuesday and rage on a Wednesday. You’ll think you’re “over it” and then a smell, a song, a breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast will undo you completely.
Why it matters: If you’re waiting to arrive at some final stage, you’ll spend years feeling like you’re doing grief wrong. You’re not. Grief is a wave, not a staircase. Once you stop expecting a straight line, you stop being thrown off by the curves.
- You can grieve someone who is still alive.
This one surprises people the most. Watching someone change – through illness, addiction, dementia, or just growing into someone you don’t recognize anymore – is its own kind of loss. So is loving someone who left, or raising a child who’s moving further from you every year.
Why it matters: This grief often goes unspoken because the person is still here, so who are you to mourn them? You’re someone who’s allowed to grieve. Loss doesn’t require a death certificate to be real.
- Grief doesn’t end. You learn to carry it differently.
I still think about Bob decades later. Not every day, not with the same rawness, but he’s still part of me. Grief isn’t a problem you solve and close out. It’s something that becomes part of who you are.
Why it matters: If you’re expecting a finish line – a day you’ll wake up and be done grieving – you’ll keep feeling like you’ve failed when it resurfaces. You haven’t failed. Loss changes you but it doesn’t own you. The goal was never to stop carrying it. The goal is to carry it without it crushing you.
- You can be functioning and grieving at the same time.
Being a competent person sucks sometimes. You can show up to work, make dinner, answer emails, hold it all together on the outside – and be quietly falling apart underneath. People will look at you and assume you’re fine because you look fine. That doesn’t mean you are.
Why it matters: Competence is a great disguise, and it can become a trap. If you keep proving you’re OK, no one thinks to ask if you’re OK – including you. Stop being brave, putting on a happy face, or pretending you’re OK when you’re not. Ask for and get the help you want. There’ll be no judgment or criticism from me.
Grief is necessary. It’s a normal human experience, and it’s important to face it, feel it, and allow it to happen – whatever shape your loss takes.
If any of this struck a chord, reply and tell me which one landed. You don’t have to carry it alone.