The Realizations Come Over Time
After someone we love dies, we naturally think about the enormity of their absence. But over time, we begin to recognize all the other things we lost when that person died.
It may be the grocery item we still notice because they loved it. A television show we once watched together. A certain chair. A phrase they always used. A familiar route we drove. The moment something happens and, for an instant, we still think, I have to tell them.
You will have your own long list.
These details may seem insignificant to anyone else. To us, they may hold an entire world—a world that only existed with that person. And as time goes on, we often discover more and more of what we actually lost when that person died. We knew we would miss them, of course. But we may not yet have understood all the ways their presence had become woven into our lives.
And this is one reason grief
can sometimes seem harder
as time moves forward.
We miss their laughter. Their warm hugs. The sound of their voice. The way they walked into a room. The expressions only they made. The things they noticed. The way they listened to us, teased us, comforted us, or simply sat beside us. We may miss the person who knew our history without our having to explain it, or the one person we could call with a particular story because we knew exactly how they would respond.
Some of these losses do not become fully visible to us right away. We discover them over time, as life continues to present moments in which that person would once have been there. And this is one reason grief can sometimes seem harder as time moves forward. It is not necessarily because we are doing worse. It may be because we are recognizing, little by little, all the things that only that person brought into our lives—all the ways they loved us, knew us, supported us, delighted us, annoyed us, and simply existed beside us in a way no one else could exactly replace.
That is because a life shared with someone is not made only of birthdays, anniversaries, vacations and important events. It is also made of thousands of ordinary moments that became meaningful simply because that person was part of them.
And sometimes one of those ordinary reminders appears when we least expect it. We can be doing perfectly well, going about the day, and suddenly feel the ache of missing them many years later, even 20, 30, 50 years later.
There does not always have to be an explanation for why that particular moment reached you. You might find the most helpful thing you can do is simply recognize it for what it is:
This matters to me because
you matter to me.
The things I miss may be small.
The love behind them is not.
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