There’s a photograph I took a few years back on the coast of Tasmania – dark clouds sitting heavy over water that is, despite everything, breathtakingly beautiful. Nature has a way of showing us these things if we’re open to seeing them. That tension, that ability to hold darkness and beauty at the same time, is what grief can feel like.
When someone dies, most of us expect grief to feel like one thing – a darkness that settles in, heavy and shapeless, something to be endured until it lifts enough to keep going.
And grief is that, sometimes. But in my experience, it’s rarely only that.
What I’ve come to understand, after sitting with many families through loss, is that grief is love and pain together – love still moving, with nowhere left to go. And when you start to see it that way, something shifts – not in how much it hurts, but in what the hurt actually means.
Pain and Love Are Not Opposites in Grief
The depth of the pain is almost always a direct reflection of the depth of the love, and I think that’s worth sitting with for a moment.
The people who grieve hardest are the people who loved most – who showed up, who were present, who built something real with the person who has died. That kind of grief is not a problem to be managed or a wound to be moved through as quickly as possible. It’s the natural weight of a life fully shared with someone else, and it deserves to be treated that way.
I’ve never once sat with a family and thought their grief was too much. What I’ve thought, more times than I can count, is that the love in the room is remarkable.
What Happens When a Heart Cracks Open
There’s something I’ve witnessed at funerals, and in the days surrounding them, that I don’t think gets talked about enough.
Grief cracks people open.
Not permanently, and not in a way that breaks them, but in a way that creates a genuine opening – a rawness that strips away the usual distance people keep between themselves and each other. And when that happens in a room full of people who loved the same person, something real occurs.
Connections form that wouldn’t have formed otherwise. People who barely know each other find themselves in honest conversations. Family members who have drifted suddenly remember why they matter to one another. A look exchanged across a room, a hand held during the service – and in those moments, everyone present feels it. The shared weight, the shared love, the fact that they are all, right now, experiencing something deeply human together.
That doesn’t happen often in ordinary life. Grief makes it possible, and I find that quietly extraordinary every single time I see it.
Am I Normal? The Numbness That Comes With Grief
One of the things people mention to me, sometimes almost apologetically, is that they don’t feel what they expected to feel.
Not sadness, not pain. Just a kind of flatness. Going through the arrangements, making the calls, thanking people at the service, and all the while wondering why they aren’t falling apart the way they thought they would be.
The short answer is yes, you are completely normal.
Numbness is not an absence of grief, it’s grief being processed at the pace the mind can actually manage. The weight is there, the love is there, the loss is there, the feeling just hasn’t caught up yet. For some people it arrives days later, for others weeks, and sometimes it surfaces quietly in an ordinary moment that has nothing to do with anything – a song in the supermarket, the smell of something familiar, a Tuesday afternoon with nothing in it.
You haven’t missed your grief. It hasn’t passed you by. It’s simply finding its own way through, in its own time.
The Beauty That Moves Alongside It
I’m not going to tell you that grief is beautiful, because on most days it doesn’t feel that way and you deserve honesty more than reassurance.
But I will say that beauty can move through grief – not instead of the pain, but alongside it. In the stories told at a service that make everyone laugh through their tears, in the friends who show up without being asked, in the memories that surface of small and ordinary moments that somehow meant everything.
Love does that. It finds its way through, even in the hardest moments, and sometimes especially in them.
After the Funeral – The Quiet That Nobody Warns You About
There’s a particular kind of hard that comes after the funeral is over, and I think it deserves more honesty than it usually gets.
In the days leading up to the service there is movement – things to organise, people to contact, decisions to make, and in that busyness the grief has somewhere to land. Then the funeral happens, and it is often genuinely meaningful, and people say the right things, and for a moment it feels like something has been held properly.
And then everyone goes home.
The meals stop arriving, the messages slow down. The people who love you return to their own lives, as they have to, and you’re left standing in a house that is quieter than it has ever been, wondering what you’re supposed to do now.
That feeling, the now what, is one of the most common things families describe to me, and one of the least talked about. The funeral is not the end of grief, it’s often closer to the beginning of it. The real weight of the loss tends to settle in the weeks and months that follow, when the world has moved on and you haven’t quite yet.
If that’s where you are, there is nothing wrong with you. There is no point at which you should be over this, and no version of grief that is taking too long. You are allowed to still be in it, for as long as you need to be.
Both Things Are True
Grief is love and pain walking side by side, and most of the time you don’t get to choose which one is louder on any given day.
You can be devastated and still feel grateful. You can feel the full weight of an absence and still be moved by the people around you. You can sit in a room with hearts cracked open, yours included, and feel underneath all of it, something that is unmistakably love.
Still present, still real, still worth something.
Grief is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It’s a sign that something mattered deeply, and that the people left behind are carrying that forward the only way they know how.
A Final Thought
If you’re in the middle of this right now, I’m not here to reframe it or put a softer edge on something that genuinely hurts.
But if you find yourself feeling more than just sadness – more connected, more open, more aware of what actually matters – that’s not a contradiction of your grief. That’s grief doing what love asked it to do.
And if you ever need someone to talk to, about any of it, I’m here.
