It’s weird how grief can feel both loud and invisible at the same time. You can be sitting in class, walking across campus, or grabbing coffee with friends, and there’s this quiet ache humming beneath everything that feels like background music no one else can hear. And if you’re someone who doesn’t easily talk about emotions, that silence can start to feel like guilt.
I’ve always been a very private person. So when my grandfather passed away, the grief felt like something I wasn’t always sure how to hold, let alone share all the time.
I find myself questioning myself on how I am supposed to grieve. Am I too quiet about it? Too okay? Or maybe too sad on certain days? It’s like there’s this invisible scale of grief, and no matter where I land, I feel like I’m doing it wrong. When I talk to family members who seem more composed, I wonder if I am too emotional. When others seemed more devastated, I wonder if I’m feeling enough.
Grief is isolating like that. It makes you compare pain and judge others’ pain as if it’s measurable, as if someone else’s grief can define how real yours is.
And yet, amid all the confusion, there’s another layer to grief that no one really warns you about, which is taking on other people’s grief. When you love the people who are hurting and can understand them, you want to hold their pain, too. You check in, you comfort, you stay strong in front of them, but somewhere along the way, you forget to give yourself permission to not be okay. You take it upon yourself to appear outwardly okay to not worry or add onto the pain of others. And when it’s quiet at the end of the day, you realize you haven’t left any space for your own grief to breathe.
But here’s where I’ve found the unexpected gift of grief reveals itself.
After the initial heartbreak, the tears, the awkward conversations, the guilt, the numbness, there’s sometimes a softness that begins to appear. You start talking to people differently. You listen a little longer. You say “I love you” more freely, not because you suddenly learned how, but because grief is teaching you the cost of not saying it.
It changes the way you experience or view time, too. Coffee dates, phone calls, little moments with friends, they all become sacred in a way they never were before. Grief reveals how fragile everything is, and somehow, that makes every moment feel more alive.
I imagine grief never really leaves your mind, but rather it transforms. It will shift from a heavy ache into a gentle reminder that connection is everything and that the people we miss shape the way we love the ones who are still here.
So maybe that’s the quiet, unexpected gift grief gives us. It teaches us to love others a little differently. And even though it hurts, I think that’s the most human thing there is, to love so deeply that losing it still teaches you how to live.