The War of grief

HEALING

4 MIN READ

You used to come see me in my dreams.

Not in the clear, not like you were meant to, not in the ways they said you would—no warmth, no whispered closure.

Just me, lying by your grave, staring up at the moon, half-daring, half-hoping he’d carry some kind of message. And every night, he’d stare right back, wide awake, bearing down on me with his silence, until finally, one night, he broke it:

“She’s not in the box.”

I remember waking up, out of breath—in tears. A kind of quiet disbelief settled in my chest—heavy on my chest.

Because you weren’t. You were never there.

Never bound to that headstone, never resting under the weight of that dirt.

I had to learn, though—learn in the slow, hollow ways that grief does its haunting… by teaching you to look for ghosts where there aren’t any.

But you were everywhere, you are everywhere—and I think that’s why I never know where to look.

I find you in a thousand small places.

In sunsets that stop me dead in my tracks because I swear you painted it just for me to see.

In my kitchen—especially in my kitchen— amongst the chaos of flour and batter—in every recipe that goes wrong because you aren’t there to say, “No, do it like this.”

There’s music too. ‘Wagon Wheel,’ ‘Springsteen’—those are yours.

They’ve stayed in my playlist just for the random chance they’ll play on a Sunday morning, and for a second, it’ll feel like you’re here, humming along like you used to.

This is what grief does, I think.

It shows up in unexpected places, in routines I didn’t know would feel so empty.

It’s the quiet war between what was and what still lingers, this strange way I carry you into the future while you stay dormant in the past.

Grief’s a strange kind of war.

You fight to hold on, but in the end, it teaches you to let go.

It doesn’t fade, not really, but it changes shape—goes from something sharp and jagged to a quieter presence you carry differently.

I spent so long thinking you were bound to one place, to one version of you, but really, you’re all around me. You live on in the routines I can’t shake, in the random song that comes on when I least expect it. This is the kind of healing they don’t tell you about—the kind that finds you slowly, like light breaking through in places you forgot needed it.

And maybe that’s how we live with it, with the weight of missing and remembering.

We make room for it, let it settle.

The world moves forward, and so do we, learning to keep them close in the little things.

You’re not in the box, you never were. Not tied to one place.

You’re here, you’re everywhere, and that’s the truce I’ve made with grief.