Content Note: This piece speaks openly about death, grief, parental loss, and the experience of losing someone suddenly. Please read it when you feel you have the emotional space to do so.
I debated going into the depths of my grief in this writing because grief can be a lot. It was a lot for me. These past few weeks have been a whirlwind of emotions, the kind that make time feel strangely distorted. I went from complaining about how socially, professionally, and ambitiously booked and busy I was, wondering when I would finally have a moment to myself, to being humbled by the vulnerability of grief within hours of those complaints. Life has an unsettling way of reminding us how quickly our priorities can rearrange themselves. The things that felt urgent in the morning can become almost laughably insignificant by nightfall. To lose someone so intertwined with how you have known your family, your childhood, and in some ways the world itself is a heavy burden for anyone to carry.
There was a very close death in my family. Someone I had known since I was a little girl. He was the fun one. The one close enough in age to somehow exist between the sea of adults and the kids, capable of sitting at the kid table with me long after we were technically adults ourselves. He was everyone’s favourite uncle in one way or another, the kind of person whose presence became part of the architecture of family gatherings. And then, through a freak accident, he was gone. Suddenly I was catapulted back into the systems of grief that emerge within homes after someone dies. The crowded rooms. The silence between conversations. The food nobody really wants to eat. The crying that begins in one corner and somehow travels across the room. The awkwardness of wanting to comfort someone when there are no words capable of changing what happened.
I have always felt somewhat uncomfortable within those spaces. Not because I am numb or indifferent, but perhaps because when you have witnessed as much grief as I have, something inside of you eventually has to decide what it believes about death. You can become angry at the world for continuing to take people from you, or you can slowly begin accepting that death, however cruel its timing, belongs to life. I think somewhere along the way I chose the latter. Acceptance does not mean approval. It does not mean I understand why certain people leave when they do. It simply means I have stopped believing that my resistance to reality will change it.
When my father passed away, my world changed. Whether it changed for the better or worse, I do not think I will ever know. Perhaps that is not even the right question anymore. What I eventually understood was that if he had been given the choice to stay, I know he would have. Strangely, that thought helped me tremendously. It separated his absence from abandonment. He did not choose to leave me. Life simply did not give him the choice to stay.
There is not a day that goes by that I do not think about him. He is part of me and will be forever, even though I have now lived longer without him than I ever had the privilege of knowing him. There is something heartbreaking about that mathematics. Memories fade in ways we rarely admit aloud. Faces become harder to reconstruct without photographs. I cannot perfectly remember what his hugs felt like anymore. I cannot always summon the exact sound of his voice calling my name when he came home. But I remember that he never entered or left the house without announcing himself. Somehow, both my brother and I picked that up along the way. These tiny behaviours become inheritance too. Sometimes grief survives not through grand memorials, but through the ordinary things we unknowingly continue doing because someone we loved once did them first.
Psychologically, repeated loss changes our relationship with mortality. When someone experiences significant losses across their lifetime, death eventually stops being theoretical. The psyche learns its landscape. You know what happens before someone dies, what happens immediately after, and what happens months later when everyone else has returned to their lives. You learn that there will still be groceries to buy. Emails to answer. Birthdays to celebrate. Flights to catch. You learn, perhaps most painfully, that life continues even when someone’s life does not.
There is a process in grief often described as integration. We do not necessarily move on from significant losses. Instead, the loss becomes integrated into the larger story of who we are. Our nervous system becomes familiar with grief’s arrival. We recognize its waves. We know that devastation can sit heavily in our chest one morning and somehow laughter can escape us that same evening. Familiarity does not make future losses hurt less. It simply means the pain is no longer entirely foreign. I know now that grief will rise. I also know that it will settle. And I know that when it rises again, I will survive that too.
Amongst all of these emotions, a trip to Vancouver that I had anticipated for months was creeping closer. Suddenly, something I had been excited about was accompanied by dread. Part of me wondered whether I should go at all. Yet underneath the hesitation was also a profound need for connection. This was not a vacation in the way many of my usual rendezvous tend to be. It became something else entirely. It became a plea for connection. A chance to see a dear old friend and family I had not seen in over a decade. Ironically, I arrived carrying my own grief only to find myself surrounded by people carrying theirs. There were personal losses, transitions, pain, and stories that somehow everyone believed I might be the right person to hold.
For a moment, I wondered whether I had simply travelled from one room of grief into another. But something unexpected happened through each passing day. My heart grew fuller. My smile slowly reached my eyes again. Conversations stretched longer. Familiarity returned where years had created distance. I found myself surrounded by warmth, history, laughter, food, stories, and people who reminded me that I belonged somewhere beyond my sadness. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I was overcome by one very simple thought: I am loved, and how lucky am I to be loved by so many.
What surprised me most was that this realization did not replace my grief. It sat beside it. Perhaps that has been the greatest lesson these weeks have offered me. We have a tendency to treat emotions as though they require exclusivity, as though sadness must consume the entire room before it can be considered sincere. When someone dies, there can even be a strange guilt attached to feeling anything other than devastated. We laugh and then remember that we are grieving. We enjoy a meal and wonder how we managed to have an appetite. We travel, celebrate, work, fall in love, make plans, and sometimes feel guilty that life is continuing when someone else’s did not. Yet the human psyche was never designed to experience emotion one at a time. We are remarkably capable of holding contradictions. Grief and gratitude can exist in the same body without diminishing one another. Joy does not disrespect sorrow. Laughter does not erase love. A beautiful day does not mean we have forgotten the person who is no longer here.
When I returned home, the grief I had left behind was still simmering. Of course it was. Geography cannot cure grief, and neither can distraction. I did not come home having escaped what happened. I came home having remembered that my life was larger than what happened. There were still people waiting to love me, experiences waiting to find me, and parts of myself that were allowed to remain curious about the future. I think that distinction matters. Healing has never asked us to abandon the people we have lost. It asks us, slowly and sometimes painfully, to learn how to carry their absence without abandoning ourselves in the process.
I am still in my grief, and in some ways I know I will always be in it. Every significant loss I have encountered has changed the architecture of who I am. Some losses created rooms within me that I would never have chosen to build, but they are mine now. Over time, I have learned how to live inside them. I have decorated them with memories, humour, photographs, traditions, stories, and pieces of the people who once occupied my life. Perhaps that is what grief integration really looks like. The sadness does not disappear. Our capacity to live around it expands.
Maybe healing, then, is not becoming less affected by life. Maybe it is becoming spacious enough to hold more of it. I can miss someone deeply and still find myself laughing until my stomach hurts. I can grieve and still travel. I can carry sadness into a room and leave that same room feeling grateful. I can think about everything life has taken from me while simultaneously being overwhelmed by everything it has given me. None of these experiences invalidate the others. They are evidence that the heart is capable of holding far more complexity than we sometimes give it credit for.
And perhaps this is one of the most difficult things grief has taught me. The measure of how deeply we loved someone cannot be how permanently devastated we remain after losing them. We do not honour the dead by refusing to participate in the lives we still have. Sometimes the greatest testament to someone we have loved is the quiet evidence that they continue to exist within us. In the way we enter a house. In the traditions we keep. In the stories we repeat. In the way we love other people because someone once taught us what being loved felt like. Their physical presence ends, but their influence becomes woven so intimately into our own lives that sometimes we do not even recognize where they end and we begin.
This was a lot to read, and I know that. I am sorry if any of these words hit particularly close to home, because if they did, it probably means that somewhere in your life you have experienced a loss significant enough to understand them. There is a particular sadness that comes with loving someone you can no longer reach. I wish there were more eloquent words to make that reality gentler, but perhaps grief deserves our honesty more than it needs our attempts to make it beautiful.
There may always be a sadness you carry because someone you love is no longer here. Certain songs will find it. Anniversaries will find it. Ordinary Tuesdays may find it. Years from now, a smell, a sentence, a familiar mannerism in someone else may briefly return you to a version of yourself that still expects them to walk through the door. That does not mean you have failed to heal. It means that love left an imprint, and some imprints are meant to remain.
You may hold some of that sadness forever, but you will not hold it forever alone. Life has a remarkable way of placing love around our losses if we remain willing to notice it. Through family, friendship, community, memory, new beginnings, and the people who sit beside us when there is nothing useful left to say, we are reminded that grief may belong to us personally, but it does not have to be carried privately.
I think that is what these past few weeks have reminded me most. I can still be grieving and recognize how profoundly fortunate I am. I can mourn who is gone while loving who is here. I can carry every person I have lost without making their absence the only story my life is allowed to tell.
There is sadness I will carry forever.
But there is also so much love helping me carry it.
