What strikes you most when you lose someone you love is not the silence, but the, continuation of everything else.
While your heart aches with the weight of absence, the sun still rises. Traffic moves. People laugh over coffee, answer emails, and make plans for the weekend. The world carries on with an almost startling indifference. And here I stand, suspended in time and space.
Even those closest to you gradually begin to speak in the past tense. Their grief, once palpable, becomes lighter, folded carefully into memory and set aside. Not because they loved less, but because life insists on moving forward. The unbearable becomes bearable; the impossible becomes history.
And yet, you remain suspended somewhere between before and after, caught in a moment that no longer exists for anyone else. Time advances around you, but part of you stays behind, standing in the place where everything changed, wondering how the world learned to keep turning when yours stopped.
Someone once said that the thing about loss is that you do not lose someone only once. You lose them the first time, and that is the inciting event. Then, if you live long enough without them, you lose them repeatedly for as long as you are alive and they are not.
Grief is not a single moment. It is a lifetime of remembering and a thousand small goodbyes.
The other day, I went to buy a few essentials at a store Mammu and I used to visit. She loved browsing the kitchen section, lingering over utensils, containers, and little things. As I walked through those aisles, memories arrived uninvited. I remembered her excitement, her opinions, her presence beside me. I cried, and I left. What overwhelmed me was not the memory, but the unbearable knowledge that we would never walk those aisles together again.
Today, when someone asks me how I am, I do not know how to answer.
A part of me is gone.
I carry my mother’s absence with a deep sense of acceptance, knowing that death is the one certainty woven into every life from the moment we are born. Yet acceptance and grief are not opposites. I carry both. I carry the understanding that loss is inevitable, and I carry the ache of missing her.
Over time, I have come to understand grief as love that persists. Love that refuses to end simply because a life has.
A poem I once read captures how I feel:
“When your voice stopped calling my name,
I ceased to exist for the world.
In a way, you took me with you.
I am still myself, but only half,
and this is how I live without you,
broken in two.
One part follows you,
and one part remains,
striving every day
to make you proud.”
Perhaps that is what living with loss becomes.
Part of me remains in the world she left behind, carrying her memory through ordinary days. And part of me still reaches for her, in places she loved, in moments I wish I could share, in the quiet spaces where her absence is most visible. I miss her every day.
But I also carry her every day. And for now, that is how love continues.
