The Quite Kinds of Grief
There are some kinds of grief nobody sends flowers for.
No one brings a casserole.
There isn’t a visitation, an obituary, or a room full of people telling stories about what was lost.
Sometimes grief is much quieter than that.
Sometimes it’s realizing a season of your life has ended.
It’s looking back at who you were ten years ago and realizing that person doesn’t quite exist anymore. Not because something terrible happened. Maybe life simply changed you.
Sometimes we grieve plans.
The marriage that didn’t happen. The career we thought we’d have. The life we imagined, back before we knew better.
And sometimes we even grieve good things.
A season can be beautiful and still need to end.
There are places I’ve been, people I’ve known, versions of myself I’ve been, that I wouldn’t necessarily want to return to. But every once in a while, I miss them.
I think that’s allowed.
Maybe one of the stranger parts of getting older is realizing how many lives we live inside one lifetime.
There was the person I was at twenty.
At thirty.
At forty.
There were things that version of me was absolutely certain about. Things I wanted so badly I couldn’t imagine wanting anything else. Things I was afraid of. Things I thought would matter forever.
Some of those things don’t matter very much anymore.
And some of them still do.
I’ve learned that moving forward doesn’t require pretending we don’t miss what was behind us.
You can know a chapter needed to close and still miss reading it.
You can be grateful for where you’re going and still feel something when you look back at where you’ve been.
You can outgrow something without deciding it was a mistake.
Maybe that’s one of the quieter forms of grief.
There isn’t necessarily anything to fix.
There may not even be anything to “get over.”
Sometimes there is simply something to acknowledge:
That mattered to me. That season mattered. That dream mattered.
That version of me mattered.
And now things are different.
So maybe we don’t need to rush ourselves through these quieter losses.
Maybe we can sit with them for a little while.
Say thank you for what they gave us.
Take whatever wisdom belongs in the next chapter.
And leave the rest where it belongs.
Behind us, but not forgotten.
Because not everything we grieve was meant to stay.
Some things were only meant to walk with us for a while.
And that doesn’t make them any less sacred.
