Grief Is Rarely Dormant

National Grief Awareness Day is this Tuesday and with it (hopefully) will come an onslaught of conversations, posts, or videos, about grief. I’m 19 years into my relationship with grief and I know a lot and not much at all. It rattles me some days just how fickle my relationship with grief can be. In moments of frustration, I wish it was more compact and that I understood it better. In moments of peace, I wish I didn’t know it at all.

I also wish we spoke more actively about how grief has many different names and they are all proper nouns — my mom’s name, my grandmother’s name, your loved one’s name.

This past weekend, I got hit with the reality that grief is rarely dormant and that I, in a lot of important ways, haven’t fully processed it. I’m weeks away from answering the last question I had around my mom’s passing and it’s bubbled up its own new wave of grief. I was gently pushed to realize that I’d been holding out on answering this question because then, maybe, her non existence wouldn’t feel so permanent. If I had more I could learn about her, I didn’t have to sit will the reality that, after this, I’ve run out of places to learn more about her.

My scenario reads as vague intentionally, but it’s also a general idea that I think so many who are navigating grief can identify with. There’s the drawer in your home or theirs that you don’t know when you’ll empty out, there’s the video on TikTok that you have saved that you wish you could send, there’s the place you’ll never visit or the place you’ll always visit because it keeps their memory alive. We want to keep some questions open because it just feels better to do so.

Sometimes, with grief, I just want to feel better. I want to hold the upper hand and feel like I can choose to break up with it whenever I want. My losses happened at two pivotal ages — when I turned 10 (two full hands that I had been desperately hoping for ) and when I turned 21 — but even so, I think that when we lose someone who is close to us, our relationship with grief cycles us back to our inner child each and every time and as kids, we’re stubborn and want to get our way.

This Sunday, I was sad. I sat down to write this because sitting down to only think about this felt lonely, at least if I wrote it, maybe it would find companionship with you too. Overall, that’s the thing about grief, it feels dormant, but never really is; it feels all-consuming, but it’s actually smaller than it feels; it feels isolating, but only if you don’t say its name out loud.

We have opportunities of connection through grief and moments that demand closure more than others. I’m bound to this experience in ways I wish I wasn’t and have been since I was 10. Some days I’m resentful of this, and I hope you know that’s a normal reality for you too — no matter how long it’s been since you experienced loss. Other days I’m just glad I’m not alone in it.