There is a kind of grief that does not come with a date attached to it.
Not the grief of a loss you can point to, a death or a leaving or a door that closed on a specific afternoon in a specific month. That grief is terrible but it has a grammar. It has a before and an after. It has something you can tell people when they ask what happened, a sentence that accounts for the size of what you are carrying. That grief is recognized. People bring food for that grief. People give you weeks, sometimes, before they ask when you will be back.
The grief I mean is the other kind.
The grief of a life that did not go the way you had it planned when you were young enough to have it planned. The grief of the version of yourself that did not happen, that was real enough in your imagination that its absence has weight. The grief of a relationship that did not end, that is still there, that still contains love, but that changed shape at some point into something that no longer fits who you have become, and you are carrying both the love and the not-fitting and there is no occasion for that grief, no ceremony, no one will bring food.
You are just carrying it alongside everything else.
I have learned to name it when it surfaces. To say: this is grief. Not sadness, which is smaller and more temporary. Grief. The real word. The word that says: something was here and is less here now and I am allowed to notice that and I do not need to resolve it today or explain it to anyone or be done with it on a schedule.
Grief does not need a date to be legitimate. It does not need a visible event. It does not need to make sense to someone else to be real.
I am learning that. Slowly, the way I learn the hard things, by having to relearn them, by having to come back to the same understanding from different angles over years until it finally settles into something I can carry without having to set it down and pick it back up every few months.
The grief is allowed to be nameless and still be real. I am allowed to carry it and still be fine. Both things. At the same time. That is the whole of the practice.
