Good Grief
I’m in the angry stage of grief and nobody warns you this stage has teeth.
I’m not mourning one thing. I’m mourning a pile of things, stacked so high I can’t tell where one loss ends and the next begins. People who loved me and are gone anyway. Dreams that died in the making — nobody sends flowers for that kind of funeral, the private one, the one that happens in your chest while everyone else thinks you’re fine. Time I’ll never get back.
Connections I almost had and didn’t. A sense of home, of belonging, that I’m supposed to just have — gone missing, and I don’t know when it left.
And under all of it: I don’t feel safe. So how am I supposed to hand comfort to anyone else when I can’t find any for myself? I love people. So many people I love are careless with me anyway — they cause hurt they don’t even see, and I can’t fix that, can’t make them gentle, can’t make the world gentle. I can only carry what it costs me.
And God feels silent right now. I call out and the sound just goes up and doesn’t come back down. I don’t know if it’s me not hearing or Him not answering. Christ, please. Just calm my heaving chest.
Because I already know what’s on the other side of the scream. Not relief. The kind of crying that steals my breath, where my body forgets it’s supposed to grieve and breathe at the same time. So I swear instead. I use the words like a blade because this rage needs an edge, and the words are the only language sharp enough to cut through the pressure without making me feel all of it at once. Not losing control. Controlling how much gets out.
Then the anger burns down a little and leaves the floor bare, and regret walks in. Quiet. It doesn’t yell, it just sits there asking questions I don’t have good answers for. What I should’ve said. What I said instead. The years I gave to things that were never going to give anything back. The times I stayed quiet when quiet wasn’t peace, just fear wearing peace’s clothes. Regret doesn’t even need to be fair to hurt like this — I can know I did my best and still lie awake rewriting conversations from a decade ago.
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And then the bargaining starts, because some part of me won’t stop showing up at a table the past isn’t sitting at. If I had just called that day. If I had left five minutes earlier. If I had loved a little louder before the door closed. I bargain with God too, even in the silence — like grief is a vending machine and I just haven’t found the right coin. Please let this hurt less by morning. Please let me not feel so much all at once.
Underneath all of it is the pain that doesn’t have a stage, it just lives here permanently — the pain of betrayal, the kind that rewrites history and makes me question every memory I thought was solid ground. The pain of abandonment, showing up in the exact moments I needed to feel strong, pulling one more thing out from under me right when I couldn’t afford to be hollow.
I miss hugging my kids — not the idea of it, the actual weight of them, arms around my neck. I miss laughing, the kind that surprises you and comes from somewhere you forgot was still working. I miss feeling like I had something to give, like my hands and my heart still had something worth handing to someone else instead of just holding myself together.
Under my skin, this itching — restless, can’t-sit-still, like my body’s trying to climb out of a grief it can’t outrun. Not poetic. Just there.
And then there’s aging, the quiet grief nobody RSVPs to. Becoming irrelevant. Watching rooms move on without needing my voice in them. Missing being needed the specific way I used to be needed, mattering by default instead of having to prove it. No ceremony for that loss. No card that says sorry the world quietly stopped asking your opinion. It just happens, inch by inch, until I’m explaining myself more than I used to, or not being asked at all.
This is the casserole. Anger and love in the same bite. Betrayal sitting next to missing my kids’ laughter. Regret beside the itch I can’t scratch. Aging folded in with all of it, one more thing being taken instead of earned.
I didn’t choose the recipe. I don’t have a clean ending either. I’m just still here — heaving chest, empty room, waiting for the sound to come back down — walking the circle grief keeps handing me, getting a little more familiar with the furniture each time around.
