You don't get over it, you grow around it

You keep waiting for it to get smaller.

That is the promise you were handed, quietly, by almost everyone. Give it time. It shrinks. One day it will be a stone in your pocket instead of the whole room.

So you wait. And a year in, then two, the loss is still exactly the size it was, and you start to think something has gone wrong with you.

Nothing has gone wrong with you.

The jar

Picture the grief as a ball inside a jar.

At the start the ball fills the whole jar. It presses against every side at once. There is no hour of the day it is not touching you.

You assume the ball is what shrinks. That the work of the years is to make it smaller, until one day it rattles around near the bottom and you are finally free of it.

But the ball does not shrink. The jar grows.

What grows is you

Slowly, and without your permission, your life gets bigger around the loss.

New people arrive. A job, a move, a Tuesday that turns out to be ordinary. Mornings you did not think you would survive become mornings you barely notice living through.

The grief has not gone anywhere. It is the same ball it always was. But the jar around it is wider now, so the ball touches the sides less often.

You do not get over it. You grow around it. The grief stays the same size, and your life slowly grows larger around the grief.

That is the whole of it. Not smaller sorrow. A bigger life holding the same sorrow.

Why it still floors you

This is the part nobody warns you about.

Because the ball never shrank, it can still fill the whole jar in a second. A song in a shop. His handwriting on an old envelope. The particular light in October.

And for that hour you are right back at the start, pressed on every side, as though no time has passed at all. People find this frightening, years on. They think it means they have gone backwards.

They have not. The shape of the grief changes without the grief ending. The days it fills the jar again are not failures. They are just the days the ball happens to be touching all the sides at once.

The math you can't unlearn

There is no finish line where the ball is gone.

There is only a life that keeps widening around it, room by room, year by year, while the loss sits in the middle of it all, unchanged, the same weight it was the day it arrived. You go on counting the years anyway, because the years are the one thing about them that keeps adding up.

You will not wake one morning cured of them.

You will wake, some ordinary morning years from now, in a life so much larger than the one you had, and find them still sitting in the middle of it, exactly where they have always been.

More in Grief over the years, or browse the whole library.

If it hurts too much right now, start here.