Grief Is Sneaky AF

Making room for memories, love, and the life still being lived.

I don't think we go through life anticipating loss or even the anniversary dates of those losses.

We experience it in many different ways. The loss of a parent, child, partner, friend, pet, a relationship, a dream, or even the version of ourselves we once knew. Grief isn't reserved for death, and sometimes the losses that aren't visible to others can hurt deeply, too.

We get angry, agitated, start putting tasks off, or find ourselves in a lull. We may not catch it as it's happening, which can easily prolong grief further than we would like. Each moment, we learn and grow, and then here we go "trying" to ready ourselves for the next loss. Maybe that's part of how we build resilience.

This year marked the first anniversary of my mom's passing. My daughter and I chose to celebrate her life without much of a plan other than to spend time somewhere we believed she would've enjoyed—near the water. There wasn't an itinerary to follow or a checklist to complete.

My heart needed somewhere else to breathe.

I set my email to vacation mode and intentionally stepped away from work. I thought disconnecting would be simple. Instead, I found myself catching a glimpse of an email notification, sending and responding to text messages from a friend, and momentarily allowing the outside world back into the quiet I had been trying to create.

With each distraction, I could feel myself disconnecting from the pause I needed.

Grief is sneaky AF. It wants to have a voice and to have us respond—cry, scream, be still, something!

Even when we intentionally make room for it, it doesn't necessarily arrive when we're prepared to sit with it. Sometimes it waits until we're distracted. Sometimes it appears in a conversation or a memory we didn't know we were about to have. Sometimes we're laughing, exploring, or going about our day when suddenly something reminds us of the person, relationship, or life we once knew.

Respond.

I didn't.

As the days unfolded, I found myself missing my mom and remembering conversations we shared and advice she had given me throughout the years. Some memories made me smile. Others brought tears. Not every memory at every moment is perfect. Some hurt.

I still wasn't responding to grief. I was trying to control it.

I went to what I do know...

I don't believe in regret.

I believe in honoring what can and cannot be, and that can still feel hard.

I remember conversations that didn't necessarily go the way I may have wanted. They happened. They're part of the story.

I can radically accept what was while still acknowledging the emotions that come with remembering it.

I'm listening to grief and beginning to see that all of this is part of grief, too.

This trip gave me space to honor my emotions instead of deciding ahead of time what the anniversary needed to look like. I paid attention to my heart, the space I needed, and allowed my past and present to exist together.

And because I paid attention to my heart, I began making different choices.

For more than 550 consecutive days, I had walked at least 10,000 steps a day. During this trip, that streak ended, and that was okay. There was something more important than 10,000 steps.

I didn't try to work out. I let my body be. I slowed down. Ending the streak wasn't failure. It was evidence that I was listening to what my heart needed.

Some routines stayed with me. I called my Papa every day, although not always at the same time I normally would. The time difference made our usual morning routine harder, so the routine changed. That was okay, too. We can honor what matters without requiring ourselves to do it exactly the way we've always done it.

My daughter and I wandered through forests without a guide and without always knowing exactly where we were going. We headed toward the Great Spruce and figured it out together. We crossed bridges, balanced on driftwood, stood on volcanic stones, watched rabbits eat the flower petals they could reach, and listened to waves crash and roar against the shoreline.

We were brave enough to try things we hadn't planned. We had hard conversations. We laughed. We cried together. Sometimes I cried alone.

Standing near the water affected me in a way I hadn't planned for. There was something about the vastness of it. The waves crashed with a force I couldn't control. Thor's Well seemed to swallow the water around it. The landscape felt almost magical in places. I could stand there feeling powerful while also recognizing the power of something much bigger than me.

There was room for both.

Maybe there was room for all of it.

Grief. Joy. Sadness. Curiosity. Courage. Love. Anger. Laughter. Stillness. Movement. Memories of my mom. New experiences with my daughter. Consistency with my Papa. None needed to cancel out another.

I realized that being intentional about grief doesn't mean controlling it. For me, it meant creating enough space to notice what was happening and listen to what I actually needed, even if I didn't know it before.

I also realized my boundaries around this time may need to be firmer than they are during the rest of the year. I may need to turn the phone off, disconnect more completely, and create fewer opportunities for the outside world to interrupt the pause.

Maybe that will change over the years. Maybe this will change next year or with a different loss.

I'm open to it.

Next time, I may leave my phone behind and purchase a camera. Not because I don't want photographs. I do. I want to remember the places I've been and the people I've shared them with.

I also want to become more intentional about which memories I'm creating for a screen and which ones I'm creating for my heart. Some of the most meaningful memories from this trip happened during conversations, while getting lost, figuring something out together, standing quietly near the water, crying, laughing, and looking at something so vast that there wasn't much left to say.

The photographs help me remember what we saw. My heart remembers how it felt.

When I think about what this first anniversary taught me, I don't think the lesson is that I figured out how to grieve. I don't think that's something I need to figure out.

I learned to listen more closely. To slow down. To be brave. To allow a routine to change without calling it failure. To create boundaries strong enough to protect the space my heart needs.

And to remember that the life I was celebrating was a life.

Not perfection.

A life filled with love, advice, laughter, hard conversations, beautiful memories, painful memories, growth, change, and all the things that make our relationships real.

Grief really is sneaky AF.

Maybe that's because love is, too. I don't know.

It appears in an old conversation we suddenly remember. In advice we can still hear years later. In a phone call we continue making. In a daughter standing beside me near the water. In tears that arrive when we thought we were okay. In laughter that arrives when we thought we were supposed to be sad.

I'm learning that I don't need every memory to be perfect. I don't need grief to follow a schedule. I don't need to choose between honoring the past and living in the present.

I can make room for both, and that's Radical Acceptance.

Slowing down. Being brave. Remembering.

Not necessarily in that order.

And perhaps the memories that matter most aren't the ones we create for anyone else to see.

They're the ones we create and carry in our hearts.