Grief need not be a life sentence. It is akin to a room that you can walk out of.
You do not necessarily walk into this room by choice. You are thrust into it, sometimes overnight, sometimes without warning. One moment the world is as it was, the next you are inside this room you never asked to enter. You do not know where the exits are. You do not even know if they exist. And in those early days of shock and denial, you are not looking for them.
Your head is down. Your hands cover your face. The walls are a blur of loss and confusion. This is not a space for problem solving. It is not even a space for feeling, not yet. It is a space of surviving.
But time, in its patient unfolding, brings movement. Slowly, gently, you lift your head. You do not do this with intention. It happens almost beneath your noticing. You look around. You start to see shape and shadow where before there was only darkness. This is not the end of grief, but it is the beginning of something else: awareness.
And then, one day, a doorway begins to show itself. You did not carve it out. You did not go searching. It appears. As if drawn into form by your willingness to look up. This is the stage of beginning to want something more. The desire to reach beyond the pain. The longing to feel something other than ache.
That doorway leads to the process we often call acceptance. But acceptance is not the end of love or the forgetting of loss. It is not a betrayal of the person you miss. It is not even closure. It is movement. It is the decision to walk toward life again.
And as you cross the threshold of that grief room, something remarkable happens. What felt so far away within the room becomes vivid and present outside of it. You begin to feel the connection again. Not as pain, but as presence. You are no longer trying to keep your loved one alive through the desperation of not forgetting. You begin to recognise the love you shared was never severed, that love remains present in the heart, where memories of the mind may fade.
I remember working with someone whose father had passed away. She had never liked a particular genre music, but after his death she began playing it constantly. It was his favourite. She was literally terrified of forgetting him, and so she surrounded herself with the sound of his past presence. But when she finally walked out of that grief room, something changed. She did not need the music anymore. Because love remained. Not in the notes of a record. Not a love bound to the presence of a body or personality, but something far grander, a universal love that never leaves. It is this realisation, a connection to this love shared between people that is bigger than the people themselves, that prevents grief from taking up long term residence in our body and mind. Grief moves on when we re-connect to the love shared.
That is what lies ahead. The place where joy returns without guilt. Where you can remember without aching. Where grief no longer defines your days. Where love is no longer hindered by sorrow.
If you are in the room, you are not alone. But there is a way through. And when you are ready, the door will present itself….it has been there all along.
