What is Grief, and What Does it Mean When We’re Grieving?
Grief is often defined by pain.
But I believe it’s more than just heartache.
It’s more than tears or sadness—it’s the deep rearranging of the soul when someone we love is no longer here.
Grief is what happens when your world suddenly stops spinning the way it once did.
When you try to go about your days, but every movement feels foreign because someone essential to your rhythm is gone.
It’s not just missing someone.
It’s learning to live without their presence while still feeling their importance everywhere.
There are moments in grief that feel like you’ve stopped living altogether.
Not because you’ve given up—but because you’re trying to figure out how to move through a world that has been restructured by loss.
And that restructuring doesn’t happen all at once.
Sometimes the absence calls you so deeply inward
that you begin to wonder if grief has changed you completely.
And often, it has.
Grief is personal.
No two people grieve the same.
How you grieve depends on who you lost, and how deeply they were rooted in your life.
For some, it’s a quiet ache.
For others, a storm.
And sometimes, it’s both.
I think of my mother—grieving the man who wasn’t just her husband,
but her pillar.
He was her steady place, her history, her forever.
And now she wakes each morning in a world without him—
trying to live her life, moment by moment, day by day.
There’s no “moving on” for her.
There’s just moving with the grief… and without the one she shared everything with.
Grief is always hard.
But when you grieve someone who was rooted in your heart, it becomes something deeper, quieter, and far more sacred.
It’s not just the pain of their absence.
It’s the reality that they became part of you.
They weren’t just someone in your life—
they were someone who helped shape You.
It means they lived in your prayers.
In your breath.
In your daily rhythm.
It means their presence stretched beyond conversation—
they were woven into your thinking, your intuition, your joy, your safety.
You built parts of your world with them in mind.
You considered them when you planned for tomorrow.
You counted on their voice when silence felt too heavy.
And now, with them gone…
you don’t just miss them.
You feel disoriented.
Because when someone is rooted in your heart,
losing them is like losing a part of your own foundation.
This grief shows up unexpectedly.
It hits during the still moments…
in the grocery store aisle,
in a familiar scent, or a song that plays.
It doesn’t scream all the time.
Sometimes it just lingers—
a low, ache, reminding you that love that deep doesn’t disappear.
It changes form.
It becomes the quiet knowing that you’ll carry them always,
When someone has rooted themselves in your heart,
you don’t “move on” from them.
You move with the grief.
You create space for both love and sorrow.
You learn to live with the paradox:
They’re no longer here…
but they’re not gone from me.
You feel their absence as presence.
You love them forward—even if they’re no longer in view.
And somehow, that love still guides you.
Grieving someone rooted in your heart means learning to live around the space they once filled—
with reverence, not regret.
It means accepting that the ache is a part of you now—
but so is the beauty .
It means knowing you are forever changed—
not broken, but deeply, eternally shaped by love.
There’s always a missing piece.
The puzzle is never whole again without them.
So how do we move forward?
Not by forgetting.
Not by forcing ourselves to “let go.”
But by allowing our hearts the grace to feel,
and our minds the space to slowly understand
that love doesn’t leave—it transforms.
We don’t let go of the person.
We let go of the idea that we’ll ever be the same.
And in that surrender,
a new version of ourselves is quietly born.
One that still grieves.
One that still aches.
But also—one that keeps going.
Because somehow, even in loss,
life gently carries us forward.
“Grief never ends… but it changes.
It’s not a place to stay, but a place to pass through with reverence.”
