Grief doesn’t wait for permission. It doesn’t arrive on schedule. It doesn’t care if you’re ready.
It finds you.
In the silence after a phone call you’ll never get to make. In the empty space where someone used to be. In the sudden rush of missing them when you least expect it—standing in the grocery store, driving home, folding laundry, laughing at something they would have laughed at, too.
Grief finds you in endings.
Not just the ones marked by funerals, but the ones that come quietly—the friendships that fade, the relationships that shift, the versions of yourself you don’t quite recognize anymore.
Because grief is not just about death. It’s about loss.
The loss of someone you love. The loss of a future you imagined. The loss of a part of yourself that no longer fits. The loss of a life you thought you’d have.
And loss demands to be felt.
Even when you don’t want to feel it. Even when you tell yourself it’s time to move on. Even when it doesn’t make sense—when you’re grieving something that you chose to leave, when you miss someone who hurt you, when you feel the ache of something that never even happened.
And that’s the cruel part of grief. It doesn’t follow logic.
You don’t get to decide how long it stays. You don’t get to control when it hits. You don’t get to avoid the sudden weight of it—because grief isn’t just sadness. It’s disorientation. It’s the world tilting slightly off its axis. It’s waking up in a reality that no longer makes sense, where someone or something that shaped you isn’t there anymore.
And sometimes, the world keeps moving too fast when you need it to slow down.
People check in at first, then expect you to be okay. They want to see progress. They want to believe that time heals, that you’re getting better, that you’re moving forward. But grief doesn’t move forward in a straight line. It loops. It circles back. It sits in your chest for weeks, then disappears—only to return months later in the form of a song, a smell, a random Tuesday afternoon that feels heavier than it should.
And the truth is, you don’t ever fully “get over” grief.
Because how do you get over love? How do you stop feeling the absence of something that mattered? You don’t. You learn to carry it. It becomes a part of you—not always heavy, not always consuming, but always there.
And maybe that’s not a bad thing.
Maybe grief isn’t just about losing. Maybe it’s about remembering.
Because grief only exists where love existed first.
And if we let it, it can be proof—not just of what we lost, but of what we had. Of what changed us. Of what shaped us.
And maybe, in some way, that’s how we keep carrying them with us. Not by moving on, but by moving with.
Embracing Shadows, Illuminating Hope,
Chelsey Fjeldheim, LCSW
Empowering Souls on the Path of Healing
Copyright © 2025 Chelsey Fjeldheim, Courage Speaks Counseling
