A Guide for Those Grieving Now and Everyone Who Will Someday
As a therapist, I thought I understood grief.
I understood that grief is nonlinear. I had completed trainings on grief and loss, learned the theories, and sat alongside clients navigating bereavement. I understood anticipatory grief, the grieving that can begin long before someone actually dies. I understood ambiguous loss and the many other forms grief can take. I understood clinically and academically that grief doesn’t follow a predictable timeline.
And then, recently, my mother died.
Despite everything I knew about grief, the finality of her death hit me like a Mack truck.
In some ways, I expected that. Of course losing my mother was going to devastate me. What I didn’t expect were all the strange things that came along for the ride: the brain fog, the warped sense of time, the physical symptoms, the sudden anger, the compulsive counting of days, the guilt when I wasn’t crying, and the experience of knowing she was gone while somehow still not believing it.
I only wish that Mack truck had come with a warning sign bolted to the grille:
THIS IS GOING TO HURT. BUT IT’S ALSO GOING TO BE WEIRD.
Maybe then some of those experiences wouldn’t have frightened me so much. Maybe I wouldn’t have interpreted every unfamiliar reaction as something I needed to understand, manage, or worry about. Maybe I would have known that grief doesn’t only break your heart. It can temporarily rearrange your relationship with your body, your memory, your emotions, other people, time, and even reality itself.
Losing my mom has humbled me greatly. I am still very much in the midst of my own grief, and I don’t write this from the perspective of someone who has reached “the other side,” as if there really is an other side.
I’m learning that there is no fixing grief. There is only absorbing it: slowly learning to carry something you never wanted to carry while life somehow continues around it.
This has been the hardest experience of my life, and it has taught me things no training could have fully prepared me for.
In the early days after my mother’s death, I started writing these things down. At first, I was doing it for myself. I wanted to remember what this actually felt like, partly because I knew this would not be the last loss of my life. As much as I wish otherwise, there will be other people I love whom I will someday have to grieve. I wanted to leave something behind for that future version of myself. A reminder that if my brain feels strange, my body feels strange, time feels strange, or I don’t recognize myself for a while, I have been here before.
Then I had another thought: Why am I only writing this down for me?
Loss is one of the few experiences none of us gets to opt out of. If you aren’t grieving someone right now, I sincerely hope you get to stay in that fortunate place for a very long time.
We prepare people for so many major transitions in life. We talk about what to expect when you start a career, get married, have a baby, move, retire, or care for aging parents. But when it comes to death, we often don’t talk much about grief until someone is already drowning in it. But loving people means that, eventually, most of us will know what it is to lose someone we love, and maybe there is value in knowing a little about that landscape before you’re dropped into the middle of it.
I wish someone had handed me something beforehand and said, If you ever lose someone you deeply love, save this. Some very strange things may happen. They won’t all happen to you, and your grief won’t look exactly like anyone else’s, but if some of these things happen, you aren’t losing your mind. You’re grieving.
So get comfortable. This is a long read, and I’ve left it that way intentionally. We live in a world of quick reads, short captions, and neatly packaged takeaways. But grief doesn’t fit particularly well into any of them. It isn’t brief, tidy, or easily condensed, and I don’t think the way we talk about it should have to be either.
You don’t have to read every word of this in one sitting. You may skim it, find the part that sounds like you, close it, save it, and come back later. Maybe you’re reading it because you’re grieving now. Maybe you’re trying to understand someone who is. Or maybe you’re fortunate enough not to need it yet, and you’re simply putting a few things in your back pocket for a future version of yourself.
So, from one grieving person and therapist to another human being who loves people they will one day have to say goodbye to, here are 10 things I wish someone had told me.
1. The Funeral May Not Be the Hardest Part
There is so much to do when someone dies. There are phone calls, arrangements, paperwork, travel, visitors, flowers, decisions, and people asking what they can do. In my case, I think adrenaline carried me through much of those first two weeks.
What surprised me was how robotic I could become. You may find yourself delivering the worst news of your life over and over in a voice that sounds strangely calm and matter-of-fact. You repeat the facts, answer the questions, hang up, and make another call. At some point, you may even hear yourself and think, Whose voice is this? Why don’t I sound like someone whose mother just died?
Then there is the funeral itself, which can have an oddly performative quality. Of course you are grieving, but you are also hosting, thanking, hugging, talking, being gracious, trying to honor the person you lost, and perhaps wanting to appear strong. Afterward come the thank-you texts and cards, the calls to return, the paperwork, and all the loose ends that still need attention.
It is exhausting, but it also gives you a job. There is always a next thing to do.
Then there isn’t.
I was completely unprepared for how different week three felt from weeks one and two. The adrenaline that had carried me seemed to disappear almost overnight, and the change in my energy was unsettling. I had assumed the earliest days would be the hardest and that, however slowly, I would begin feeling more capable as time passed. Instead, I felt more depleted.
The adrenaline wore off at almost the exact moment life expected me to start functioning normally again.
Going back to work felt surreal. I had just experienced something enormous enough to divide my life into a before and an after, yet I still needed to answer emails, show up places, figure out dinner, and get gas on my way to work.
My mother just died, and I need to stop for gas.
That juxtaposition was jarring. The magnitude of what had happened felt completely incompatible with the mundanity of what life was asking me to do.
And with fewer arrangements to make and fewer people around, there was finally more room for the grief itself. The exhaustion was heavier, the distractions were fewer, and the reality of the loss was beginning to settle in.
The days and weeks after the funeral may require some of the most grace. A harder week does not mean you’re going backward. Sometimes the earliest days are carried by shock, adrenaline, responsibilities, and other people. When those things fall away, you may finally feel just how exhausted and heartbroken you actually are.
This may also be a time to intentionally seek out low-demand companionship. Not plans that require you to entertain anyone or even talk much. Watch a television show together. Take a walk. Eat dinner with someone. Sit on the couch.
There is something helpful about being with someone who doesn’t ask much of you but can simply bear witness to the grief and the strangeness of returning to ordinary life after something extraordinary has happened.
Sometimes the funeral isn’t the hardest part. Sometimes it’s when everyone goes home, the adrenaline wears off, and the rest of your life starts back up.
2. You Can Know They’re Gone and Still Keep Looking for Them
One of the strangest parts of grief is being completely aware that someone has died while simultaneously feeling like it cannot possibly be true. You may understand the facts and still feel like they’re simply somewhere else. You may instinctively reach for your phone to call them, briefly expect them to walk through the door, or think you see them for a split second in a familiar face, coat, car, or walk.
Knowing someone died and emotionally accepting the permanence of that loss are two different processes.
Your brain spent years expecting this person to exist. It makes sense that it takes time for your internal world to catch up with a reality you never wanted it to learn.
That expectation can also show up in another way: looking for them everywhere.
You may find yourself searching for signs. A song comes on at exactly the right moment. A bird lands nearby. You see their birthday on a clock. Something happens that feels so specific or perfectly timed that you cannot help but wonder, Was that you?
You may also simply feel them. Not necessarily see or hear anything, but have a strong sense that they are somehow close. You may dream about them, notice reminders constantly, or experience moments of connection that are difficult to explain but deeply comforting.
People will understand these experiences differently. Some will understand them spiritually. Others will understand them psychologically, as the mind becoming especially attuned to reminders of someone it desperately misses. I don’t think you have to decide exactly what they mean in order for them to matter to you.
What can be especially painful is when that sense of connection changes.
There may be days when you feel them everywhere. And then one day, nothing.
No dream. No sign. No strong feeling that they are near.
The absence of that feeling can almost feel like losing them again.
You may wonder where they went or whether you’re becoming disconnected from them. But connection after loss does not have to feel the same every day in order to still exist.
Sometimes we find them in signs. Sometimes in dreams. Sometimes in memories, stories, traditions, photographs, or pieces of ourselves. And sometimes, for a while, we may not feel them anywhere at all.
Not feeling their presence does not mean you have lost them again.
3. Grief Can Change Your Memory, Attention, and Sense of Time
Grief can make you feel cognitively incompetent. You may lose words, forget appointments, struggle to read, lose your train of thought, or find ordinary decisions strangely exhausting. Work you’ve done a thousand times may suddenly require tremendous effort.
For me, one of the scariest parts was how nonexistent my short-term memory sometimes felt. There were days when I genuinely struggled to remember what I had done the day before. It wasn’t just being distracted or forgetting why I walked into a room. At times, it felt like entire pieces of my recent life weren’t sticking.
Memory depends on attention. Before your brain can retrieve a memory later, it first has to adequately take in and encode what is happening. Grief can consume an enormous amount of our attention. Part of your mind may be replaying what happened, thinking about the person you lost, managing waves of emotion, functioning on poor sleep, or simply trying to get through the day.
So sometimes what feels like I’m losing my memory may actually be closer to my brain didn’t have its usual capacity to take this in and store it clearly in the first place.
My brain wasn’t necessarily failing me. It was trying to process something enormous while I was simultaneously asking it to keep doing all the ordinary things a brain is expected to do.
Time can feel strange, too.
You may start doing what I’ve come to understand as “grief math.” You know exactly how many days it has been. You think about what you were doing three Saturdays ago. You look at a photograph and calculate how many days before the death it was taken. You find yourself thinking, At this exact time last month, everything was still normal.
You may even start counting how long it has been since you had a really big cry and assigning meaning to that number.
Why haven’t I cried today? Am I grieving enough? Am I adjusting too quickly?
But grief isn’t measured in tears, and the number of days since your last big cry tells you nothing about the depth of your love.
Suddenly, time divides itself into before they died and after they died. We expect birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries to hurt, but grief has a much bigger calendar than that. It can be the first snowfall, the first vacation, the first accomplishment you can’t tell them about, or the first family photograph with someone missing.
4. Your Body Grieves Too
Grief isn’t only emotional. It can show up as exhaustion, headaches, nausea, shakiness, digestive changes, body aches, restlessness, insomnia, excessive sleep, sensitivity to noise and stimulation, or a heaviness that feels almost physical.
It can also change dramatically from one day, or even one hour, to another. You may go to bed thinking, I’m actually doing okay. I think I can handle tomorrow, and wake up feeling like you’re treading quicksand. Nothing necessarily happened overnight.
Tonight’s capacity does not guarantee tomorrow morning’s capacity.
The reverse is also true. A terrible morning doesn’t necessarily predict the rest of your day. “I feel okay right now” doesn’t mean grief is over, and “I feel terrible right now” doesn’t mean you will feel this terrible forever.
I’ve started thinking of grief a little like the weather in the Midwest. Sometimes it’s so unpredictable that you don’t even need to wait until tomorrow for the forecast to change. Sometimes you just need to wait an hour. A morning that feels unbearable can soften by afternoon, and a relatively peaceful afternoon can give way to a difficult evening.
Of course, new, significant, or concerning physical symptoms should still be medically evaluated rather than automatically attributed to grief.
5. Grief Does Not Perform on Command
You may decide you’re going to intentionally make space to grieve. You put on their music, look at photographs, light a candle, sit down prepared to cry, and nothing happens.
Then two days later you’re sobbing in the grocery store.
I’ve learned that designated grief time is an invitation, not an obligation.
You can cry, journal, remember, talk to them, sit quietly, or feel absolutely nothing.
You may also be functioning relatively well until someone looks at you with genuine tenderness and asks how you’re doing. Suddenly, you’re crying.
Sometimes we need to see our grief reflected through someone else’s empathic eyes. A person’s body language, facial expression, tone of voice, or the way they simply sit with us can validate just how awful this really feels. That kind of recognition can create enough safety for emotions we may have been holding together on our own.
Sometimes another person’s empathy gives grief somewhere to land. You may cry more around certain people not because you’re sadder around them, but because you feel safer being sad around them.
6. Guilt Is Sneakier Than You Expect
I expected sadness. I expected missing my mother. I even expected regret. I wasn’t prepared for how creative grief could become at finding reasons to make me feel guilty.
A missed phone call suddenly matters enormously. A text you answered late becomes evidence in a case your brain is building against you. You remember a visit you postponed, something you said, something you didn’t say, or a moment when you were impatient.
Grief creates an impossible hindsight problem: you are judging the person you were then with information only the person you are now possesses.
You didn’t know how many phone calls remained. You were behaving like someone in an ongoing relationship, someone who reasonably expected another conversation. Sometimes the most heartbreaking thing about a missed call is also the most human: you expected there to be another one.
Guilt can also feel more tolerable than helplessness because guilt gives us the illusion that perhaps there was something we could have controlled.
What if I had noticed something sooner? What if I had said something different? What if I had made another choice?
And sometimes the thought isn’t even, Maybe I could have prevented this. Sometimes it’s, Maybe I could have made this hurt less.
There can be this fantasy that if we had loved perfectly, shown up perfectly, or somehow known the clock was running out, the grief would be easier now.
But no amount of perfect loving would have made the loss painless.
One shift can be learning to move from “what if” to “even if.”
Even if I told them every day that I loved them, made sure they felt appreciated, had one last conversation, and said everything I wanted them to know, I couldn’t make this hurt less.
“Even if” is not about pretending we have no regrets. It is about loosening the endless negotiation with a past that cannot be renegotiated.
There is another way guilt can show up, too. You laugh. You enjoy dinner. You have a good day. Several hours pass without thinking about them, and guilt arrives.
How can I be having fun? Am I already moving on?
We can begin to confuse suffering with loyalty. Pain becomes confused with connection. Misery becomes confused with remembrance. Guilt becomes confused with love.
But making ourselves miserable does not keep someone closer.
You don’t honor the dead by making sure part of you dies with them. You honor them by finding ways to carry the love forward.
Feeling better does not mean forgetting them. Adapting to someone’s death does not require erasing your relationship with them. You can laugh again, have good days, and still carry the relationship with you.
7. Anger May Show Up Everywhere
I expected to be angry about the illness, death, and the injustice of losing someone I loved. I wasn’t prepared to sometimes feel angry at seemingly everything else.
Things that would normally be mildly irritating can suddenly feel intolerable. Misunderstandings, insensitive comments, assumptions, logistical problems, or people simply going about their normal lives can trigger a level of anger that feels completely out of proportion to the situation.
Sometimes even witnessing other people’s ordinary relationships can set it off.
A mother and daughter shopping. Someone casually calling their dad. An elderly couple holding hands. Someone complaining about their parent.
You may feel tenderness, jealousy, anger, sadness, or resentment, sometimes all at once. Grief can make other people’s ordinary moments look unbearably precious.
Grief can also leave very little emotional margin. Sometimes the anger is sadness. Sometimes it’s helplessness. Sometimes exhaustion. Sometimes it’s the infuriating reality that the world continues behaving normally when yours has fundamentally changed.
And strangely, anger can sometimes feel empowering.
Sadness can make us feel collapsed. Anger is mobilizing. It gives the body energy and somewhere to put the unbearable feeling of I cannot do anything about this.
Sometimes anger may even function like a protector, or a temporary vacation from the more vulnerable emotions underneath it.
You might ask, What is this anger protecting right now? What is underneath it? What does my body need?
And if the anger is pointing toward something genuinely important, you don’t have to dismiss that either. Someone may really have hurt you. A boundary may actually need to be set.
But you also don’t have to decide what to do about it while your nervous system is on fire.
This may matter, but I don’t have to act on it while I’m at a 9/10.
When possible, build in a delay between the feeling and the response. Write the text and don’t send it. Put the email in drafts. Tell yourself, I can decide what I want to do about this tomorrow. Give it a night, or even a few hours, and come back to it when the intensity has dropped.
Sometimes the first task is simply giving the physiology somewhere to go. Walk quickly. Stomp. Shake out your arms. Squeeze something. Push against a wall. Cry. Write the completely uncensored version of what you want to say without sending it.
You don’t have to shame yourself for the anger. And you don’t have to obey everything it tells you to do.
8. Loss Can Create an Urgent Need for Control
Death confronts us with something we cannot control, and afterward the mind may desperately search for control somewhere else.
I found one version of this showing up in an unexpected place: wanting to prepare for my own death.
After experiencing how much has to be managed when someone dies, I found myself wanting to organize anything I possibly could for the people I love someday. Medical information, passwords, important documents, wishes, accounts, arrangements, and all of the information grieving people can suddenly be expected to manage while their brains are barely functioning.
Some of that planning can be genuinely practical. But I also had to recognize what my brain was trying to accomplish underneath it.
Something completely outside of my control had just happened, and I was looking for something I could control.
The same urgency can show up elsewhere. You may suddenly feel certain that you need to quit your job, move, change careers, get your affairs in order, or solve problems you’ve tolerated for years.
Some realizations that emerge during grief may be important. Loss can absolutely clarify what matters.
But grief also turns up the volume.
Instead of immediately concluding, I need to quit my job, it may help to think, I’m noticing that my job feels very different to me right now.
Write it down. Talk about it. Pay attention to it. Notice whether it remains true across different emotional states.
A feeling may contain important information without requiring immediate action.
9. The People You Need May Not Be Able to Give You What You Need
This may be one of the loneliest parts of grief.
The people closest to you may love you enormously and still be surprisingly bad at comforting you. They may be grieving themselves. Your loss may activate losses of their own. They may desperately want to fix something that cannot be fixed. They may become uncomfortable with helplessness and check out. They may say the wrong thing, or nothing at all.
Their limitations can still hurt.
But sometimes there’s another loss underneath that disappointment: the person who died may have been one of the people who knew how to comfort you best.
Someone tries to comfort you and somehow misses the mark, and you may immediately think, They would have known what to say. I wouldn’t have had to explain this to them.
Sometimes nobody can get it quite right because what you actually want is impossible.
Something terrible happens and your first instinct is, I need to call them.
And then comes the realization: this is the terrible thing you would have called them about.
You may want their advice about their own death. You may want them to tell you how you’re supposed to survive losing them.
Other people can love you and support you beautifully, but they cannot recreate that particular relationship.
Sometimes what you are longing for isn’t better support.
You want your person.
It can help to spread support around. One person may be good at listening. Another may handle practical things. Someone else may tolerate hearing the same story for the tenth time. A therapist or grief group may understand something your family cannot right now.
No single person has to carry every part of your grief.
10. Your Relationship With the Person Does Not End When They Die
Grief is not only missing the past. You grieve the future, too.
You’re grieving the conversations that won’t happen, advice you won’t receive, trips you imagined, milestones they won’t witness, photographs that won’t be taken, and future versions of yourself they won’t get to know.
Sometimes it isn’t even the big milestones that hurt the most.
You grieve the ordinary Tuesday afternoon when you would have called because something mildly annoying happened at work. The ridiculous story they would have laughed at. The photograph you would have texted them. The accomplishment you know would have made them proud.
You don’t only miss the person. You miss having somewhere to put all the parts of your life that used to belong in your relationship with them.
We tend to think of grief as missing what we had. But grief is also mourning what will never get to happen.
Grief can also change how you remember the relationship. You may suddenly become fiercely protective of the person who died. Their flaws can begin to disappear while their best qualities become brighter and more important. Acknowledging imperfection may even feel disloyal.
Eventually there may be room for complexity. You can adore someone and acknowledge that they drove you crazy. You can miss someone desperately and remember the parts of the relationship that were difficult. They were human, and you loved them anyway.
One thing I have found meaningful in grief is the idea of continuing bonds. The goal does not have to be to “let go” of the relationship as though love should end when a life does.
The relationship changes, but we can continue finding ways to be connected to the person we lost.
That might mean talking to them. Writing them letters. Making their recipes. Wearing something that belonged to them. Celebrating their birthday. Carrying on a tradition. Listening to their music. Telling their stories. Asking yourself what they might say to you in a difficult moment. Noticing the pieces of them that continue to influence how you move through the world.
Sometimes you may even notice them in yourself. You hear one of their phrases come out of your mouth, recognize their humor in your own, or realize that the way you love other people contains something they taught you.
The relationship changes because it has to. Its meaning does not have to disappear.
There Is No Correct Way to Miss Someone
You may cry constantly or barely cry. You may feel numb or overwhelmed. You may count the days, search for signs, laugh and then feel guilty, or feel close to them one day and impossibly far away the next.
None of it measures how deeply you loved them.
Grief is not a performance. There is no amount of suffering you have to produce to prove that someone mattered.
I think that is ultimately what I am learning now, not as a therapist, but as a daughter. There isn’t an “other side” where the loss becomes undone, and there isn’t a therapeutic trick that fixes it. There is only the slow, uneven process of absorbing what happened and discovering how to carry it.
And if you’re grieving right now, I hope at least one thing here made you think, Oh. Someone else does this too.
Sometimes knowing that doesn’t make grief hurt less. But it can make it feel a little less lonely.
I share this not as someone who has figured grief out, but as someone still learning it. I started writing these things down because I needed words for experiences I hadn’t been prepared for. Then I realized I didn’t want to keep those words only for myself.
So I’m sharing them while I’m still in the middle of it, in case they help someone else feel a little more prepared for grief someday, or a little less alone in it today.
When Extra Support May Help
There is an enormous range of grief, and there is no prize for carrying it alone. Additional support may be helpful if grief feels persistently impossible to carry, you’re becoming increasingly isolated, basic functioning remains significantly disrupted, trauma surrounding the death is dominating your experience, substance use is increasing, or you’re worried about your safety.
Support might come from a trusted person, therapist, grief specialist, support group, physician, or spiritual community.
Something enormous happened. You deserve support while learning how to carry it.
If you need help navigating your own grief, reach out to us at Bright Spot Therapy or call 248-296-3104. You don’t have to have the right words, know what stage you’re in, or know exactly what you need before asking for support.
