Grief doesn’t end when the world expects it to. It lingers — heavy, quiet, sometimes loud, sometimes numbing. And somehow, in the midst of that weight, life continues. Bills come in. Days pass. People move on. And you’re left trying to figure out and rebuild a life that doesn’t look the same anymore.
You move forward, not after the grief, but with it.
Grief isn’t linear. The five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — aren’t a checklist you complete and file away. You might bounce between them, skip one entirely, or come back to the same emotion again and again. That’s normal. These stages aren’t rules. They’re reflections of how deeply we feel, proof of love, connection, and humanity. After all, you don’t grieve for someone you didn’t love or were connected to on a deeper level.
Embrace your grief, and allow yourself to feel them, the void they left behind, the emptiness. The worst thing you could possibly do to yourself is ignore it, put on a brave face and skip over the entire grieving process.
We live in a world that loves that interchange words that should not be, thereby causing emotional chaos and sometimes social inadequacy. It never pays to take an emotional shortcut, to skip that all important step but sooner or later it will backfire. One such pair of words is mourning and grief.
Grief is internal. It’s the ache in your chest, the tears that hit you unexpectedly, the memories that stop you mid-sentence. You grieve a loss, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a person or a death. Mourning, on the other hand, is how we express that grief outwardly — through rituals, tears, conversations, or silence. Both are necessary. And both deserve space.
There’s value in solitude. Time alone allows you to listen to your grief, to understand it, and to sit with it without distraction. These moments, though painful, are sacred. They help you reconnect with yourself, especially when everything else feels lost. But remember: being alone to grieve doesn’t mean you have to be lonely. There’s a difference.
Acceptance doesn’t mean forgetting. It doesn’t mean the pain disappears. It means you’ve come to understand that the loss is real — and you’re learning to live around it. This is where rebuilding begins.
Rebuilding is not about replacing what was lost or filling the void. That void will always be sacred. Instead, rebuilding means growing around that space. It means shaping a new life that honours what you’ve lost while allowing room for what might come. It means holding on to life gently as you take one step at a time. It means laughing again and crying at the same time. It means making plans for the future, even if part of your heart still lives in the past.
You can still be grieving and moving forward. These things are not opposites — they coexist.
You are allowed to be a work in progress.
New from Marie Balustrade:
Read the published author interview from Teader‘s House UK HERE
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