Grief: When Something is Gone, and yet it Continues to Exist

Grief is that horrible psychological and physiological experience when your mind and body have to update reality after a meaningful loss. It's not just sadness, it's so much more. One dimension to it, is that it has a huge element of learning.. painful learning that something important is gone… and you have to reorganize your world around that.

"One of the hardest parts of loss isn’t just missing the person, but missing the version of you that existed when they were here. The life you had. The routines. The sense of "us". Grief isn’t only about losing them. It’s also about adjusting to a world that feels unfamiliar." (SURVIVING GRIEF – 365 Days A Year book)

When loss happens, your system keeps expecting what used to be there. Grief is the slow, painful process of noticing the absence, protesting against it, relearning reality (even when you don't want to). Grief is less like “getting over something” and more like walking a new, unfamiliar, emptier, darker path that you need to adapt to.

Fortunately (or not, it's questionable), grief is not linear because your brain doesn’t update reality all at once. Instead, it repeatedly bumps into the truth, like a memory, a routine, a place, a smell, a sound, a quiet moment. And each time, your system goes: "Wait... where is he/she/it?"

That moment of mismatch of expectation and reality produces a wave of grief. Perhaps, that is your brain learning in installments. People expect sadness, but grief is a full emotional ecosystem - sadness, anger, anxiety, guilt, relief, confusion, numbness etc. Apart from that, grief is also physical, not just emotional. Your nervous system slows down, it is conserving energy because something fundamental changed -“Pause! We need to reorient.”

At a deep level, grief asks you to do three very hard things - accept the reality of the loss, find a new way to stay connected with him/her/it (internally, symbolically) and reinvest slowly in life while carrying the loss. That's why letting go is not the goal.Updating the relationship is.

In comparison to other intense psychological experiences, like fear which is like a smoke alarm, grief is more like a broken bone healing. It hurts when touched, and you can’t rush repair, you need to adapt how you move, the area may stay sensitive for a long time (or forever), healing still happens to some extend. Trying to rush grief healing is like trying to walk normally on a fracture because you’re tired of limping.. it's just not going to work. Early grief feels like suffocating, or choking. Later grief feels like a scar that aches when the weather changes.

In that sense, grief is evidence of a connection that was real enough to reshape us. It hurts because the world is now different - and because we are.