5 Things Nobody Tells You About Grief

Curries, meal deals and unexpected items in the bagging area.

There is a version of grief people seem prepared for. The quiet version. The respectful version. The one where someone looks out of a window while rain runs down the glass, holding a mug in both hands, with sad piano music playing somewhere in the background.

That version does exist sometimes, I suppose. There are moments when grief really is still and solemn and almost cinematic. But most of the time, in my experience, grief is far stranger than that. It is uglier, sometimes more boring, more physical, more ridiculous and far more confusing than I ever expected. It’s tears in one room and someone trying to find the Wi-Fi password in another. It is discussing funeral flowers, while someone asks if anyone has put the bins out. It is being absolutely broken and still somehow needing to keep a dentist appointment.

Before it happened to me, I thought grief just meant sadness. Heavy sadness, obviously, but sadness all the same. That was naive. Grief is sadness with a load of other stuff welded to it: shock, guilt, anger, exhaustion, love, memory, numbness, admin, and a strange sense that ordinary life has suddenly become offensive.

Nobody hands you the proper guidebook for it. So here are five things I wish someone had told me.

1. Your brain will still forget they are gone sometimes

This is one of the cruellest things, because it doesn’t usually happen during the grand emotional moments when you are braced for it. It happens in the stupidly normal moments, when your guard is down and life is briefly behaving like life again.

Even now, there are times when something happens with one of the kids and my brain instinctively goes to tell Mom. Some little update. Something funny. Something she would have wanted to know. Something she would have reacted to in that exact way only she could. It is rarely some huge, profound thing. Most of the time it is just ordinary family news, the sort of thing that would have kept a conversation going for ten minutes and probably ended with her telling me about something completely unrelated.

The curry thing is the one that still gets me, which sounds ridiculous until you understand that Mom and I were massive curry fans. Properly invested. We would send each other pictures, recipes, tips, little improvements, warnings about which ingredient brands were a disgrace to the art of BIR, and the occasional proud photo of a curry that looked like it belonged in a Balti house rather than on someone’s hob. It was one of our little things.

So now, I can cook a decent curry and, for half a second, my first instinct is still to take a picture and send it to her. Look at this, Mom. Not bad, ay? I might even have that tiny flicker of excitement you get when you know exactly who will appreciate something. Then the truth lands again, and it does not land gently. It hits like a train.

That is what people do not tell you. You do not only lose the person once. You lose them again in hundreds of tiny moments when your old life reaches for them before your new life can stop it. Your brain hasn’t caught up. Your love hasn’t caught up. The habits of having someone do not disappear just because the person has.

There is a particular cruelty in that split second before remembering. For a tiny moment, they are still alive in the wiring of your mind. Then reality corrects itself rather brutally.

2. Ordinary life can feel obscene

After someone dies, the world carries on with a level of confidence that feels almost rude.

The traffic lights still change. People still moan about parking. The self-checkout still accuses you of having an unexpected item in the bagging area, even though, frankly, the unexpected item is now your entire life. Someone still wants to talk about a wind-damaged fence. Someone still asks what you are having for tea. And you know, rationally, that this is how it works. The world can’t just stop because your family has been smashed open, but, still, there is a part of you that almost resents it for not stopping anyway.

That was one of the loneliest parts for me. It was not just that Mom had died. It was that everything else had the absolute nerve to continue. You walk around with this private catastrophe inside you, and other people are still doing normal Tuesday things. They are buying milk, checking football scores, choosing meal deals, arguing with customer service, wondering whether it is going to rain. Meanwhile, you are standing there thinking, how can this be the same world?

Grief makes ordinary life feel badly staged. Everyone else seems to know their lines, while you are stood in the middle of the set with no idea what scene you are supposed to be in or whether you ever signed up to be in this rubbish performance in the first place. You can perform normal for a while, because you have to, but underneath it there is this quiet disbelief that the world has absorbed nothing. Your life has been rearranged completely, yet the kettle still boils in exactly the same way.

3. You grieve the future as much as the past

I expected to miss the old stuff. That part made sense. I expected old photographs to hurt. I expected certain songs, places and dates to come with a sting. What I did not expect was how much grief would project itself forwards too.

You don’t only miss what already happened; you miss everything that will now happen without them. The birthdays they will not be at. The updates they will not hear. The family moments where that someone should have made a daft comment from the corner. The Christmases where the room is technically full but still has a gaping hole in it somehow. You even miss the version of yourself who did not yet know what this felt like.

It isn’t so much that you are stuck in the past, but more like the pain keeps running ahead and waiting in bushes for you on the road ahead.

“…grief can ambush you long after the first shock has passed".”

4. Grief makes you guilty about things that make no sense

Nobody warned me how much self-judgement would come with grief. You would think death would be enough by itself, but apparently the human brain likes to add a courtroom drama on top.

You feel guilty for crying and then guilty for not crying. You feel guilty if you laugh too soon, as if one normal human reaction has somehow betrayed the person you loved. You feel guilty if you feel numb, because numbness looks suspiciously like not caring, even when it is probably your brain putting sandbags around itself before the flood comes in. You feel guilty for being angry, guilty for being tired, guilty for needing people, guilty for wanting everyone to leave you alone.

The worst thing is that most of this trial is happening inside your own head. Nobody else is keeping score in the way you imagine they are. Nobody has a grief spreadsheet where they mark down whether you cried the correct amount at the correct time. But grief does not argue fairly. It takes love and twists it into evidence against you.

I think part of the problem is that we imagine grief should look consistent. If you loved someone, surely you should feel one clear, appropriate thing. But grief is not consistent because people are not consistent. One minute you are devastated, the next you are laughing at something stupid, then suddenly you feel guilty for laughing, then you feel guilty for feeling guilty, and before you know it, your mind has turned into one of those group chats where everyone is talking over each other.

It’s exhausting; I’m also learning it’s quite normal.

5. Grief shows you who can actually sit with pain

One of the hardest things about grief is that it does not only reveal your own heart. It reveals other people’s capacity, too.

Some people surprise you in the best way. They do not arrive with a speech or a big dramatic gesture. They just keep turning up. They message. They remember dates. They check in without needing you to perform gratitude. They do not panic when you are sad, and they do not try to rush you back into being easier to deal with. There is a quiet holiness in people who can simply sit with you in the mess.

Other people disappoint you, and that can be a grief of its own. Some vanish because death makes them awkward. Some say things that are probably meant kindly but land like a brick. Some try to tidy your grief up because your pain is inconvenient to them. Some make you feel as though you now have to manage their discomfort as well as your own loss, which is a brilliant arrangement if the aim is to make a devastated person even more tired.

I have tried to be more generous about this as time has gone on, because not everyone has the emotional equipment. Some people are not cruel; they are limited. But limitation still hurts when you are the one bleeding. Grief makes you remember who made the weight lighter and who somehow added a few bricks to the bag.

The people who can sit in it with you are rare. Keep those people close. Often they are the ones doing the small, quiet, unshowy things that actually help.

The part I am still learning

I do not think grief ends in the way people sometimes suggest. It changes, thank God, because nobody could survive the first version forever. The first version is too heavy. It takes over your body. It sits in your chest, your sleep, your appetite, your patience and your ability to think clearly. It makes normal tasks feel like you are trying to complete them underwater.

Over time, though, it becomes less constant. You can breathe again. You can laugh without feeling quite as guilty. You can talk about them without every sentence collapsing. You can have days where life feels almost normal, and then a curry, a child’s update, a photograph or some stupid little family phrase can bring the whole thing back into the room.

That doesn’t mean you are back at the beginning. It means love is still looking for somewhere to go.

Maybe that is what grief is, in the end: love that still has its coat on, standing at the door, waiting to be sent somewhere. It goes into stories, prayers, habits, jokes, recipes, photographs, family updates, and all the tiny instincts that remain after someone has gone. It goes into the things you still want to tell them.

And if the cost feels unbearable at times, maybe that is because the love was real enough to leave a proper wound.

I still reach for my phone sometimes.

That says more than any polished explanation ever could.