It has been one year and two months. People around me have quietly decided I should be through the worst of it by now. Nobody says this directly. It is communicated in smaller ways — the checking in has slowed, the "how are you really?" questions have stopped.
But grief doesn't follow the timeline people assign to it from the outside.
Last week I was in a supermarket and a song came on — one she used to hum in the kitchen — and I had to abandon my trolley and go sit in my car for twenty minutes. This is the reality of it. The ambush. The way it hides in ordinary moments and then detonates without warning.
I am not the same person I was before she died. I don't think I will be. And I'm slowly making peace with that — with grief not as something to be resolved but as something that changes shape as you carry it.
For those of you further along this path — does it get lighter? Not over, I know it's never over. But does the weight become more bearable? And how did you handle the people around you who expected you to be "better" before you were?