Reflections on Grief & Loss

The Uninvited Guest

I remember the exact shade of grey the sky was on the day my father died. It wasn’t a stormy, dramatic grey, full of thunder and intent. It was a flat, lifeless grey, the colour of dishwater and forgotten things. The world didn’t stop. The birds still chirped their infuriatingly cheerful songs, and the postman still put the mail through the slot with a familiar thud. But my world had stopped. It had fractured into a million tiny pieces, and I was left standing in the rubble, not even knowing where to begin.

Grief doesn’t knock. It doesn’t send an invitation or wait for a convenient time. It kicks the door in, tracks mud all over your clean floors, and sits down at your kitchen table like it owns the place. It’s the uninvited guest who never, ever leaves. It just changes its shape, sometimes becoming so small you can almost forget it’s there, tucked away in a corner. And other times, it grows so large it fills the entire room, sucking all the air out until you can’t breathe.

This isn’t a guide on how to “beat” grief. I don’t think that’s possible, or even the point. This is just my story, my reflection on the years I’ve spent with this guest. It’s about the mud, the mess, the quiet moments, and the slow, painful process of learning to make room for it at the table.

The First Wave: Shock, Numbness, and the Fog

The first few days and weeks are a mercy, in a strange way. The shock wraps you in a thick, protective blanket of numbness. I’ve heard people describe it as being underwater, and that’s close to what it felt like for me. Everything was muffled. Voices reached me from a distance, and people’s expressions of sympathy seemed to be happening on a screen, not to me directly.

I did all the things you’re supposed to do. I made the phone calls. I answered the door. I nodded and said "thank you" a thousand times. I chose the casket and the flowers. But I don't think I was really there for any of it. I was just a body going through the motions, a puppet whose strings were being pulled by tradition and necessity.

My Body Knew Before My Mind Did

My mind was foggy, but my body was screaming. I couldn't eat. The thought of food was repulsive, and when I did force something down, it sat like a stone in my stomach. Sleep was a battle I rarely won. I would lie in the dark for hours, my heart thudding against my ribs for no reason, my thoughts racing in a tight, pointless circle. Then I’d fall into a shallow, dreamless sleep for an hour or two, only to wake up with a jolt, the reality of my loss crashing down on me all over again.

That physical response is real. It’s not in your head. I later learned that acute grief can trigger a massive stress response in the body, flooding it with hormones like cortisol. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) explains that this prolonged stress can disrupt sleep, affect appetite, and even weaken the immune system. I wasn’t going crazy; my body was simply reacting to a trauma, trying to process an emotional wound as if it were a physical one. And in many ways, it was. I felt a hollow ache in my chest that was as real as any broken bone.

The Myth of "Getting Through" the First Few Weeks

Everyone talks about "getting through" the funeral, as if it’s a finish line. Friends and family surround you, bringing food and telling stories. There's a flurry of activity that keeps you occupied, distracted. But for me, the hardest part wasn't the funeral. It was the silence that came after.

It was the moment the last well-meaning relative drove away, the last casserole was put in the fridge, and I was left alone in a house that felt too big, too quiet. The numbness began to wear off, like a local anaesthetic fading, and the raw, throbbing pain started to set in. That's when the real work of grieving began, not in a room full of people, but alone in the quiet of an ordinary afternoon.

Navigating the Wilderness: When the World Moves On and You Can't

There is a profound and terrible loneliness that comes with grief. A few weeks pass, then a month, and the world, quite reasonably, starts to spin again. People go back to their jobs, their routines, their own lives. The phone calls become less frequent. The check-ins taper off. And you’re left standing still while the rest of the world moves on at a dizzying speed.

I felt like I was living in a different timezone from everyone else. They were talking about work deadlines and weekend plans, and I was still trapped in that grey, lifeless day. The gap between my reality and theirs felt like a chasm. It’s not their fault. How could they possibly understand the landscape of my new world when they were still living in the old one? But it made me feel invisible.

The Loneliness of a Tuesday Afternoon

The big "firsts" are hard. The first birthday without them, the first holiday. Everyone prepares you for those. But no one prepares you for the crushing weight of a random Tuesday afternoon. I was in the grocery store once, a couple of months after my dad passed. I saw his favourite brand of biscuits on the shelf and I reached for them out of habit before I remembered.

And I just stood there, in the middle of the aisle, with a box of digestive biscuits in my hand, and I couldn't breathe. Shoppers pushed their carts around me, oblivious. A stock boy was whistling a pop song. In that moment, I had never felt more alone in my entire life. It’s those small, mundane moments—the song on the radio, the smell of someone's cologne, a joke you want to share—that become the most brutal reminders of what you’ve lost.

Anger: The Emotion No One Wants to Talk About

I was so, so angry. And I was deeply ashamed of it. I was angry at my father for leaving. I was angry at the doctors for not being able to save him. I was angry at my friends for complaining about their perfectly healthy, annoying parents. I was angry at God, at the universe, at the sheer, random injustice of it all.

This anger felt ugly and wrong. Grief is supposed to be sad, right? We see sadness as a pure, acceptable emotion. But anger? That feels like a betrayal. I remember snapping at a friend who told me, "He's in a better place." I wanted to scream. What better place? His place was here, with us.

It was a relief to later read about Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's work. While her five stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—are often misunderstood as a linear path, they gave me a language for what I was feeling. The American Psychological Association (APA) clarifies that these are not steps to be completed, but rather a "general pattern of response" that can occur in any order. Knowing that my anger wasn't an aberration, but a common and valid part of the grieving process, gave me permission to feel it without the added weight of guilt. It was a signpost in the wilderness, letting me know that others had walked this path before.

The Guilt of a Good Day

Then came an even stranger emotion: the guilt of a good day. About six months in, I was having coffee with a friend, and she said something funny, and I laughed. A real, deep, belly laugh. And as soon as it happened, a cold wave of guilt washed over me. How could I be laughing? How could I feel a moment of joy when my father was gone?

It felt like I was forgetting him, like my happiness was a betrayal of his memory. This is such a cruel trick the grieving mind plays on itself. You desperately want a moment of relief from the pain, but when it comes, you punish yourself for it. It took a long time to understand that my joy didn't diminish my love or my loss. It was possible to hold both at the same time: the deep ache of his absence and the small, warm light of a happy moment. One did not cancel out the other.

Grief Isn't Just One Thing: Acknowledging the Different Faces of Loss

My father's death was a seismic event in my life, a clear before and after. But as I’ve lived longer, I've come to realise that grief is a far more frequent visitor than I ever imagined. It doesn't just show up for death. It shows up for all kinds of endings, big and small. We grieve for the lives we thought we would have, for the people we used to be, for the futures that will never come to pass.

This is often called "disenfranchised grief," a term coined by Dr. Kenneth Doka. It refers to any loss that isn't openly acknowledged or socially supported. There are no casseroles or sympathy cards for these kinds of losses, which can make them even more isolating to carry.

The Quiet Grief of a Lost Friendship

I lost my best friend of fifteen years, not to death, but to a slow, painful drifting apart that culminated in a single, awful argument. There was no funeral, no closure. Her name just stopped appearing on my phone. Her presence, which had been a constant in my adult life, was suddenly a gaping hole.

I mourned her. I mourned our shared history, the inside jokes no one else would understand, the person I could call at 3 a.m. without hesitation. And it was a confusing grief. There was no one to be angry at but us. There was no "better place" to imagine her in. There was just the quiet, aching absence of her. I learned that you can miss a living person with the same intensity that you miss the dead.

Mourning the Person I Used to Be

A few years ago, I went through a period of chronic illness that completely upended my life. I couldn't work in the same way, I couldn't socialise like I used to, my physical abilities were limited. On top of the physical pain and exhaustion, there was a profound sense of loss for the person I was before.

I missed the Raja who could hike for hours without a second thought. I missed the spontaneity, the energy, the easy confidence that my body would just *work*. It took me a long time to admit that I was grieving that former self. It felt self-indulgent. But that loss was real. I had to mourn the life I had planned in order to begin accepting and building the life I actually had. It was a process of letting go of an identity that no longer fit.

Anticipatory Grief: The Long Goodbye

Before my father passed away, he was sick for a long time. Those final years were a strange and painful journey through what I now know is called "anticipatory grief." It's the grieving process that happens *before* a death.

Every day, I was losing little pieces of him. The loss of his memory, the loss of his strength, the loss of his sharp wit. I was mourning a man who was still sitting right in front of me. It was a terribly confusing time, filled with a mixture of love, sadness, and a desperate hope for a miracle that I knew wasn't coming. It's a unique kind of pain, the long goodbye, and it doesn't make the final loss any easier. It just means your grieving process starts much, much earlier.

Finding Anchors in the Storm: What Actually Helped

In the beginning, people offer a lot of advice. "Stay busy." "Time heals all wounds." "Be strong." Most of it is well-intentioned but feels hollow. Platitudes bounce right off the raw surface of grief. What I found, over time, was that healing didn't come from a grand gesture or a single moment of epiphany. It came from small, quiet, consistent anchors that I could hold onto when the waves of pain felt overwhelming.

These weren't solutions. They didn't "fix" the grief. But they made it possible to breathe while the storm raged. They made the wilderness feel a little less terrifying.

The Power of Simply Being Present (For Myself and Others)

The most useless phrase in the English language might be, "Let me know if you need anything." When you're grieving, you don't even know what you need. And the energy it would take to figure it out and then ask for it is more than you can possibly muster.

The friends who helped the most were the ones who didn't ask. One friend just showed up at my door with two cups of coffee. He didn't say much. He just sat with me in my messy living room while I cried. He didn't try to cheer me up or offer solutions. He just sat there, a quiet, steady presence in the chaos. His presence said, "You are not alone in this." And that was everything.

I also had to learn to be present for myself. This was much harder. It meant allowing myself to feel whatever I was feeling without judgment. If I was angry, I let myself be angry. If I needed to spend a whole Saturday on the sofa watching old movies, I let myself do that. This idea is central to the work of Dr. Kristin Neff, a leading researcher in self-compassion. She talks about treating yourself with the same kindness you would offer a good friend. Instead of fighting my feelings or berating myself for "not doing grief right," I started to just notice them. "Ah, sadness is here today." Or, "I see you, guilt." This simple act of acknowledgement, of giving myself grace, was transformative. It stopped the cycle of suffering on top of my suffering.

Rituals of Remembrance, Big and Small

The world gives us formal rituals—funerals, memorials. But I found that the most comforting rituals were the small, private ones I created for myself. On my dad’s birthday, instead of just being sad, I started a tradition of cooking his favourite meal, *biryani*. I’d put on the old Bollywood music he loved and spend the afternoon in the kitchen. It was a way to feel close to him, to actively remember him with love and joy, not just sorrow.

The rituals don't have to be grand. Sometimes it's just lighting a candle on a difficult day. Or taking a walk in the park he used to love. These small acts create a space for remembrance. They say, "You are not forgotten. You are still a part of my life." They help weave the memory of our loved ones into the fabric of our present, rather than relegating them to the past.

Giving My Feelings a Name

Grief is a tangled, chaotic mess of emotions. In the beginning, it was just a giant, overwhelming cloud of "bad." I couldn't untangle the sadness from the anger from the fear from the loneliness. It was just all-consuming.

I started writing in a journal. I didn’t do it every day, just when the feelings were too big to hold inside. I didn't worry about grammar or making sense. I just wrote. I wrote about the biscuits in the grocery store. I wrote about how angry I was. I wrote down memories I was terrified of forgetting.

The act of putting words to the chaos was incredibly powerful. It didn't make the feelings go away, but it made them manageable. It was like taking a tangled ball of yarn and slowly, patiently, teasing out the individual threads. This is a concept that researchers and therapists often talk about—the power of naming our emotions. Dr. Brené Brown says, "We can't process what we can't name." Giving my feelings a name took them from being a terrifying, amorphous monster in the dark and turned them into something I could look at, something I could understand, and ultimately, something I could learn to live with.

Learning to Live with the Scar

There's a common misconception that grief has an endpoint. That one day you wake up and you’re "over it." That time heals the wound and it disappears. I haven't found that to be true. Time doesn't heal the wound, but it does soften the edges. The wound becomes a scar.

The scar is a part of you forever. You can feel it when you run your fingers over it. Sometimes, on a cold day, it aches. And sometimes you forget it's even there. But it never truly goes away. And I’ve learned that this is okay. It is a testament to the love that caused the wound in the first place.

Grief as a Form of Love

A few years ago, I came across a beautiful idea that completely reframed my understanding of grief. The idea is that grief is not the absence of love. Grief is love itself, in its final and most enduring form. It is all the love you want to give but cannot. All the unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, in the lump in your throat, in that hollow place in your chest.

Grief is love with nowhere to go.

Thinking of it this way changed everything for me. It meant that the waves of sadness weren't a sign of weakness or a failure to "move on." They were a sign of how deeply I had loved. My grief was a measure of my father's impact on my life. The pain was no longer just a negative, destructive force. It was the other side of the coin of love. And I would not trade that love for anything, not even to escape the pain. This perspective echoes the therapeutic concept of "continuing bonds," which suggests that it's healthy and normal to maintain a connection with the deceased, transforming the relationship rather than ending it.

A Final Thought: You Are Not Alone in This

The scar on my heart still aches sometimes. The uninvited guest of grief still sits at my table. Some days it is quiet and polite, and other days it is loud and demanding. But I am no longer afraid of it. I have learned its contours, its rhythms. I have learned to make room for it.

If you are walking through this wilderness right now, if you are sitting in the dark with your own uninvited guest, please know this: you are not alone. Your pain is real, it is valid, and you don't have to rush through it. Be gentle with yourself. There is no timeline. There is no right way to do this. There is only your way.

And a day will come, I promise, when you will be in the grocery store and you will see the biscuits, and you will smile before you cry. The two feelings, joy and sorrow, will finally learn to sit at the table together. And you will know that you are going to be okay.