What I Got Wrong About Grief
What I Got Wrong About Grief
I had a plan.
I know that sounds almost funny in hindsight — making a plan for grief — but I did. I found a Grief Share group and went. I joined an online widow support group. I took my eight children to therapy. I sat in my own therapy. I put in the time. I sat in the hard conversations. I did not look away.
And somewhere underneath all of it, I believed that if I did enough — felt every feeling, showed up to every hard anniversary, put in the work — I would eventually arrive somewhere. Somewhere called better.
Year two came. And it hit me like a brick.
I had done everything I knew to do, and I still felt this much. The thought that landed on me was brutal in its simplicity: now what? I've done all I know to do, and I am not better. There were weeks that tipped into something close to despair. I journaled through it. I prayed through it, even when I didn't feel like praying.
Here's what I've come to understand since: grief was never something I was supposed to complete. It doesn't have a finish line. It has integration — the slow, ongoing work of learning to hold a loss without being flattened by it every time it arrives.
I think about it now the way I think about the mosaic this podcast is named for. A mosaic artist doesn't remove a broken piece to fix the picture. She sets new tile around it — piece by piece, year after year — until that one broken piece is still there, still visible if you look closely, but no longer the whole picture. It becomes part of something bigger than itself.
That is not the same thing as year two being easier. It isn't, always. But hard and growing can both be true in the very same week.
If you're early in your own grief and this makes you afraid of what's ahead — please hear this: it is not a guarantee. Grief doesn't move the same way through every woman. What I want you to take from my story is permission, not a prophecy. You do not have to grieve today's grief and next year's grief at the same time. Today only asks today of you.
Listen to the full episode: "What I Got Wrong About Grief (And What I'd Tell Myself Now)" — Episode 4 of Mosaic: Beauty in Every Broken Piece.
