12/29/2025
Insightful and factual observations on grief and grieving.
Jim Carrey once spoke about grief in a way that stopped many people cold. Not because it was poetic, but because it was painfully familiar. He said grief is not just an emotion. It is an unraveling. A place where someone lived in your heart, and now they are gone.
Anyone over fifty knows this truth too well. You have buried parents. Friends. Spouses. Siblings. Sometimes even children. Loss is not a chapter you close. It is a room you walk past every day.
At first, grief feels violent. It hits your chest when you wake up. It follows you into quiet rooms. It shows up in grocery store aisles, in old songs on the radio, in empty chairs at family gatherings. People around you move on with their lives, and inside you want to scream because your world stopped, yet no one noticed.
Then time passes. Not because you wanted it to. Not because you were ready. Time passes anyway.
The pain does not disappear. It changes. The sharp edges dull, but the weight stays. You stop crying every day, but the ache settles deeper. You learn how to carry it to work, to birthdays, to holidays. You smile while holding something broken inside, and no one sees it.
Here is the part people rarely say out loud. You never move on. You move with it.
The love you had does not die. It shows up when you laugh and then feel sad for laughing. It shows up when you reach for the phone and remember there is no one to call. It lives in old photos, in familiar smells, in habits you still cannot break. That love stays because it was real.
And that is not weakness.
Grief is not something to hide. It is not something to be embarrassed by. It is proof that your heart was brave enough to love deeply. In a world that teaches people to stay guarded, you loved anyway. That matters.
There is no schedule for grief. Anyone who tells you there is has never truly lost someone. Some days you feel steady. Other days one small memory brings you to your knees. Both days are normal.
If you are grieving now, do not rush yourself. Do not let anyone tell you it is time to be over it. Let yourself remember. Let yourself miss them. Let yourself feel angry, grateful, broken, and still standing.
Healing does not mean forgetting. Healing means learning how to hold love and loss in the same hands. And if you are still here carrying both, it means your heart is stronger than you think.
