GRIEF
When grief visits without warning
Grief rarely waits for an anniversary. It arrives in grocery aisles and car rides, asking to be felt on its own schedule, not ours.
Grief doesn’t check the calendar
We tend to expect grief around anniversaries, holidays, birthdays — the days we’ve marked as significant. But grief has its own sense of timing, and it often shows up in the most ordinary moments: a familiar song, a specific shade of light in the afternoon, a stranger’s laugh that sounds like someone you lost.
These unscheduled waves can feel disorienting precisely because they’re unscheduled. You had no chance to brace yourself. But an unexpected wave isn’t a setback in your healing; it’s a sign of how much that person or that chapter of life mattered.
Letting the wave pass through
When grief arrives uninvited, try not to fight it back down. Give it a few minutes of your full attention — even if you’re standing in a parking lot. Waves that are allowed to move through us tend to pass more quickly than the ones we clench against.
