When my grandma passed, it felt like the air had been pulled out of me. For a long time, I didn’t know how to place myself in the world without her. I would try to reach for words, but they all seemed too small, too fragile, too thin to carry the weight of what I felt.
Yesterday was her death anniversary. i thought the hardest part would be the date itself—the marker, the reminder circled on the calendar. And in some ways, it was. I cried, I remembered, I missed her. But I also smiled. I even laughed. Because memories of her aren’t only sad. They’re warm, full of light, full of the kind of love that still lives in me. For a moment, I thought maybe I’d figured out how to carry it. It almost felt like I could sit beside the memory without breaking.
But today feels different. Heavier. Angrier. Yesterday, the grief sat quietly, almost respectfully, as if it knew I had prepared for it. Today it’s louder. Sharper. It presses down harder, like a delayed wave finally catching up and knocking me under.
I feel miserable, and I can’t help but think I’m pulling others into it too. Anger sparks over the smallest things, and shame is always close behind. It shows up in strange ways. Irritation at the smallest things. A voice too loud. A pointless text. Even the silence of my own room. None of it really matters, and I know that. It isn’t about those things at all. It’s about her not being here. It’s about me still being here, trying to move through a world that feels emptier without her in it. And it feels unfair, somehow, that after all this time, grief still finds new ways to tear me apart.
That’s what grief does to me. It strips away my patience, my softness. It leaves me raw, with no buffer between myself and the world. Every little thing becomes unbearable, and I can’t explain why. I’m not really angry at the noise, or the people, or the silence. I’m angry that she isn’t here. I’m angry at death itself, at the bluntness of its finality, at how deeply unfair it all still feels.
I know grief doesn’t move in straight lines.
I know it doesn’t show up only when you expect it to.
I know it’s not a single day circled on the calendar, neatly contained within twenty-four hours.
I know it’s the day after.
I know it’s a week later.
I know it’s a smell that drifts past you in the street.
I know it’s a laugh you hear that sounds like theirs.
I know it’s the silence after you remember again that they’re not here.
But despite knowing, the weight still knocks me off my feet. Grief does not care what I know. It arrives anyway, uninvited, curling itself around my chest, making air sharp, making time unbearable. It drags me back into that first moment of loss, no matter how far I think I’ve come.
Even now, all these years later, I still want to tell her things. I still want to sit beside her. I still want her here. And nothing I know, nothing I tell myself, makes that wanting go away.
Grief is not the past returning.
It is the wound reminding you it never closed.
And maybe it never will.
