They say grief is love with nowhere to go.
But that’s only the beginning.
What they don’t say is that grief is not a single feeling — it is a shapeshifter. It arrives as a storm, leaves behind a fog. It hides behind your smiles and shows up at the most inconvenient times — not always in sadness, but in silence. In numbness. In the quiet unraveling of meaning.
When my father died, something fundamental collapsed inside me — quietly, invisibly, without ceremony. The world did not stop. My calendar remained full. My inbox didn’t pause. And neither did I.
In the months that followed, I became a master of appearances. I inhabited rooms. I nodded at the right moments. I responded to “How are you?” with the right blend of politeness and deflection. I was living the life I had built — the one that looked full and thriving on the outside.
But inside, I was adrift. Unmoored.
And above all, empty.
Not the kind of empty you feel after a long day or a difficult week.
This was the kind of emptiness that rearranges your inner architecture. The kind that makes joy feel foreign. The kind that makes time feel suspended — not in stillness, but in disconnection.
I remember sitting in meetings, speaking fluently, delivering outcomes. But I was not there. I was functioning on memory, on momentum. Like a ghost of my former self, I could see everything but touch nothing. I went from one role to another — mother, professional, friend — with practiced ease, while a part of me kept looking for the man who had quietly exited the stage.
I didn’t lose just a parent.
I lost a mirror. A grounding force. A quiet source of strength I didn’t even know I was leaning on until it was gone.
People talk about heartbreak, but what I felt wasn’t just a broken heart. It was the disintegration of language, of identity. It was staring at a world that still looked the same — but no longer made sense.
Grief is not always loud.
Sometimes, it’s the opposite of loud.
It’s the stillness that comes when everything that mattered has left the room, and you’re the only one who noticed.
In losing my father, I learned that “everything” is an illusion when the person you want to share it with is no longer there. The house can be full, the sun can shine, your achievements can pile up — and still, nothing quite reaches you.
And yet, I didn’t fall apart.
That’s the paradox.
I kept going. I had to keep going.
For my daughter. For my commitments. For the version of me that the world still needed. But inside, I was carrying a silence so heavy, it bent the light around it.
It took me time to understand that this emptiness wasn’t something to fix.
It wasn’t a hole to be filled, or a phase to be hurried through.
It was sacred.
It was the shape his absence left behind. A love too big, too enduring, to simply disappear.
Over time, I stopped trying to outrun it. I started sitting with it. Listening to it. Letting it teach me.
Grief taught me patience — with myself, with others.
It taught me presence — not the curated kind, but the raw, wordless kind.
It taught me that there is no hierarchy of pain — and no timeline for healing.
But most of all, it taught me about truth.
About what matters.
About who I am when the noise quiets down and I am alone with memory.
I still miss him — sometimes with a longing so sharp, it takes my breath away. But I no longer try to fill the emptiness.
Instead, I carry it.
Like a scar.
Like a relic.
Like a reminder that I loved deeply, and was deeply loved in return.
Because in the end, emptiness is not the absence of love.
It is the echo of love that once filled the room.
And now, it lives in me.