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Why Healing from Grief Isn’t the Same as Getting Past It
There are things people stop saying out loud after a while.
At first, when your world falls apart, everyone rushes in—meals, messages, flowers, prayers. But as the calendar pages turn, something shifts. People stop asking. The texts slow. The invitations return. The silence grows. And in that silence, an unspoken expectation starts to surface:
Shouldn’t you be doing better by now?
And so, I want to say something clearly—not just for myself, but for anyone whose grief doesn’t fit inside someone else’s timeline:
I’m not over it. I’m living with it.
And no, those aren’t the same thing.
The World Wants a Timeline. Grief Refuses One.
There is a deep discomfort in our culture around prolonged sorrow. We like beginnings, middles, and clean endings. We want people to "move on"—not out of cruelty, but out of fear. Because if your grief is still here, still raw, still reshaping you… then we have to admit that some things in life are not fixable.
But grief, real grief, doesn’t follow a linear path.
It’s not a staircase you climb.
It’s more like the ocean—calm one moment, stormy the next.
You can’t schedule the waves.
As the Psalmist reminds us:
“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”
—Psalm 34:18
Grief arrives, and it stays. It evolves. It surprises you. Some days, you carry it lightly, like a stone in your pocket. Other days, it sits on your chest and steals the air from your lungs. Time does not erase it—it just teaches you how to breathe around it.
I Didn’t Just Lose a Person—I Lost a Life I Knew
People often try to relate by comparing losses. But not all grief carries the same weight or shape. I didn’t lose someone I saw on holidays or called every few weeks. I lost the person I made my coffee next to every morning. The one who filled the house with warmth, laughter, security, routine. The one I whispered to in the dark, made plans with, leaned on, leaned into.
We weren’t separate people with separate stories—we were a shared rhythm, a woven life. And when he died, that whole world collapsed. I didn’t just lose him. I lost the me who existed with him.
And no amount of time can undo that.
You don’t “move on” from the kind of love that made you who you are.
Healing Isn’t a Destination. It’s a Relationship.
I used to think healing would mean feeling better. That one day I’d wake up lighter, freer, whole again. But what I’ve learned is this:
Healing isn’t about escaping grief—it’s about learning how to walk with it.
Paul encourages us in 2 Corinthians 1:3-4:
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.”
I have grown stronger. I have found ways to smile again. I’ve felt flickers of joy, moments of peace. But the grief is still there, woven into every corner of this new life I didn’t choose.
Healing has looked like:
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Letting the tears come without shame
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Laughing in a moment of beauty and not feeling guilty afterward
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Keeping his photos in my living room without needing to explain
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Making space for both sorrow and hope at the same table
I’m not trying to get back to who I was. That person died, too.
I’m trying to honor who I’ve become—someone who loves deeper, feels wider, and understands that some wounds don’t close, but instead become sacred space.
The Pain of Being Misunderstood
There’s an added layer to grief that doesn’t get talked about enough—the pain of being misunderstood by those around you.
People don’t mean harm when they say things like:
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“God has something different for the second half of your life”
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“You still have your girls, focus on them”
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“At least you had good years together”
But those words, however well-meaning, carry judgment. They imply that your continued sorrow is a sign of weakness, dysfunction, or delay. When in reality, your grief is a sign of your capacity to love. You hurt deeply because you loved deeply. You mourn because it mattered.
Jesus himself wept for his friend Lazarus (John 11:35) — the shortest verse in the Bible, but one packed with compassion. It shows us that grief is not a failure of faith, but a human expression of love and loss.
Living With Grief Means Carrying Love Forward
I still talk to him in the quiet. I still ache for him in the crowd. I still sense his absence in the empty chair, the songs he used to sing, the spaces where his voice used to live.
But I also carry him with me now—in the courage to keep going. In the softness I offer to others who are hurting. In the strength it takes to build a life on ground that once collapsed beneath me.
Grief doesn’t mean I’m stuck in the past.
It means I’m bringing the best of what was into the life that still is.
It means I’m choosing to live—not in spite of my loss—but because love is worth carrying forward.
As Romans 8:38-39 reminds us:
“For I am convinced that neither death nor life… nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
If You’re Grieving Too…
I want you to hear this in your bones:
You are not doing it wrong.
You are not behind.
You are not broken.
You are a person who was changed by love—and undone by its absence.
You are learning to breathe again in a world that feels foreign.
You are not “over it.” And you don’t have to be.
You are living with it. And that is the holiest kind of strength.
