Grief Has No Expiration Date
And other things nobody told you...
You didn't have to carry that alone.
Maybe nobody ever said that to you. Maybe you were the one holding things together long before you were old enough to know that wasn't your job. Maybe you learned early that when things got hard, you were the one who stayed standing, the one others leaned on, the one who figured it out.
A lot of people who find their way to grief work got there the same way. Not through a textbook. Through living.
This post is for everyone who has ever needed someone to say: you don't have to have it together right now. You can put it down. I'm not going anywhere.
Grief doesn't get better with time. Not exactly.
That's the thing people say, isn't it? Time heals. It gets easier. You'll feel better eventually. And there is something true in there, buried under the part that isn't true. Because the grief itself doesn't shrink. The love doesn't shrink. What changes, slowly and not always in a straight line, is your ability to walk alongside it. To carry it without being crushed by it. To have a day, and then another day, and then a whole week where you functioned and maybe even laughed, and then to have the grief roll back in like weather and know, this time, that the storm will pass again.
Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is something you learn to walk with.
Some days it walks beside you quietly. Some days it sits down in the middle of the road and refuses to move. Some days it ambushes you in a grocery store with a box of cereal and three years of missing someone hitting you all at once. None of that means you're broken. All of it means you loved someone. All of it means the loss was real.
There is no timeline. There was never a timeline.
Empoorium exists at a particular intersection, the place where life and death meet and regard each other with honesty. Some of the people who find their way here are nearing the end of their own lives. They are sitting with anticipatory grief, mourning futures that won't happen, people they'll leave behind, versions of themselves they're quietly saying goodbye to. That grief is vast and tender and deserves to be held with both hands.
And some people who find their way here lost someone five years ago, ten years ago, a lifetime ago, and still find themselves ambushed by a moment so sharp it feels brand new. A laugh that sounds like someone else's laugh. A season that always belonged to them first. A song, a smell, a particular quality of afternoon light.
These people sometimes wonder if something is wrong with them. If they should be over it by now.
There is nothing wrong with them. Long grief is not broken grief. It is loyal grief. It is love with nowhere left to go, still looking.
Grief doesn't need fixing. It doesn't need a five step plan or a timeline or someone cheerfully reminding you that everything happens for a reason. It needs to be witnessed. It needs someone who won't flinch when it gets loud or messy or completely silent. It needs someone who will sit with you in it without rushing toward the exit.
That's what I try to offer. Not perfect answers. Not a roadmap. Just presence. The kind that says: you can collapse here. I've got you. You are not alone in this.
I think about the plants on my patio sometimes when I think about grief. The ones that come to me half dead, leaves curling, soil bone dry, written off by everyone who had them before. They don't need to be fixed. They need water and light and someone to stop walking past them. Given that, most of them come back. Not the same as they were. Something new. Something that has been through something.
That feels right to me.
You are welcome here, wherever you are.
If you are in the early rawness of a loss, you are not behind. If you are years out and still feeling it, you are not broken. If you are approaching the end of your own life and grieving what you haven't yet lost, you are not too much. You are human, doing one of the most human things there is.
I view death as a friend. I hope that when my time comes, she reaches out with as gentle a hand as I have tried to offer. Until then, I'll be here, on the patio, among the plants and the bees and the quiet, holding space for anyone who needs somewhere soft to land.
If you'd like to talk, I'm here. 🦋