Grief Without a Timeline

Grief does not always arrive with drama. Sometimes it turns up while I am doing something ordinary. Washing dishes. Driving home. Sitting quietly, thinking about something else entirely. There is no shock anymore, no sudden realisation. Just the steady awareness that someone is not here and that they will not be again.

What catches me off guard is not the loss itself. It is the fact that I have been carrying this knowledge for a long time without quite acknowledging what it means. That this absence has settled into my life. That it has become part of how I move through the world.

For a long time, I assumed that grief worked the way people said it did. That time would soften it. That there would be a point when I would feel better, lighter, and more like myself again. I waited for that moment, quietly marking time, telling myself that this was just a phase I needed to get through.

What I eventually had to face was more unsettling. Time alone was not changing this. There was no point at which the grief lifted and handed me back the version of myself that existed before the loss.

There is a particular pressure that comes with this realisation. An unspoken expectation that by now I should be fine. That I should have adjusted, adapted, and moved on. People do not always say it directly, but it sits in the air. In the way conversations move quickly away from loss. In the way discomfort shows up when grief lasts longer than expected.

This pressure does something subtle and damaging. It turns grief into a personal failure. It suggests that if I am still hurting, I must be holding on too tightly. That I am doing grief incorrectly. That the problem is not the loss, but my inability to let it go.

I see this same struggle in many of the people I work with. Some are grieving people they loved. Some are grieving relationships that ended without closure. Some are grieving versions of themselves they can no longer access. The childhood they did not have. The life they thought would unfold differently. The body or identity they have had to release to survive.

What they often say, quietly, is “I thought by now I would be better; over it”.

Buried inside that sentence is the belief that grief has a natural arc. That it begins intensely, then fades, then resolves. That if it doesn’t, something has gone wrong. What few people acknowledge is that this is only true for some kinds of loss. Other griefs do not resolve. They change shape. They become woven into the fabric of who we are.

There was a moment when I stopped waiting to feel better. Not because I gave up, but because I realised that waiting was keeping me stuck. I was measuring myself against a future that was never coming. The person I had been before the loss was not returning, no matter how patient I was.

Something shifted when I allowed that to be true.

The grief did not disappear. But it stopped feeling like something I was trying to outrun. It became something I was learning to carry. Not heroically. Not gracefully. Just honestly. It became the new ‘normal.’

I began to notice that the grief had taught me things I would never have chosen to learn. A different relationship to time. A deeper tolerance for uncertainty. A quieter appreciation for presence. A reduced appetite for pretending. I became slower to rush, less interested in surface answers, and more aware of what matters to me.

This does not mean I am grateful for the loss. I am wary of the idea that grief should turn into a gift. That can feel like another way of asking people to justify their pain. What feels more accurate is that grief changes you. And when you stop fighting that change, when you stop expecting yourself to return to who you were before, you begin to discover who you are becoming.

The question is no longer whether I will feel better. It is whether I will allow myself to be someone who has grieved, without shame. Someone whose life includes loss, and depth, and complexity. Someone who no longer measures their healing by how well they perform recovery.

There is a quiet relief in letting grief exist without a timeline. I'm no longer asking it to hurry up. I’m allowing it to take up the space it needs.

Grief does not mean I am broken. It means I have loved, lost, and lived in a way that has left a mark. And I am learning, slowly, how to live with that mark rather than trying to erase it.  What about you? If this resonates and you wish to explore further, book a call.