You cannot shortcut grief. But you can honour it — and in doing so, discover the quiet reserves of strength you did not know you had.
We live in a culture that is deeply uncomfortable with grief. It wants us to move through it quickly, neatly, in a way that does not inconvenience anyone. It offers us timelines and stages and the quiet implication that if we are still affected after a certain point, something has gone wrong.
Nothing has gone wrong. Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is a love that has lost its outward form, looking for a new place to live. And it does not respect schedules.
What I have learned — not from a book, but from the women around me and from my own life — is that you cannot shortcut grief. You can only go through it. There is no over, no around, no neat detour. The only way out is through, and the through is longer than anyone wants it to be.
But here is what they do not tell you: going through it changes you in ways that are not only painful. It deepens you. It makes you more capable of holding another person's sorrow, because you know the weight of your own. It teaches you that you can endure something you once believed would end you — and that you are, in fact, still here.
Honouring grief does not mean wallowing. It means allowing it the space and time it actually needs, rather than the space and time you wish it needed. It means being gentle with the woman who is carrying it — yourself — on the days when she cannot do what she could before, and trusting that capacity will return. It always does.
The growth that comes from grief is quiet. It does not announce itself. You notice it one day in the way you respond to someone else's loss — with a steadiness you did not have before. In the way you no longer fear sadness the way you once did, because you have learned that you can hold it and still stand.
If you are in the through of it now, be patient with yourself. You are not behind. You are not taking too long. You are doing the work that no one can do for you, and it is making you into someone you could not otherwise have become. That is not weakness. That is the deepest kind of strength there is.
Stop. Pause. Spray. Overcome.
