Grief and Me
I wouldn’t say Grief and I are friends, though we know each other well.
Grief thinks it’s amusing to surprise me, showing up unexpectedly, sometimes wearing a funny expression, leaving me to guess the joke.
Grief at times can be cruel, winging an errant obstacle pathward, leaving me stumbling, knees scraped and hands raw.
Grief enjoys turning rock n’ roll into lullabies and poems into death metal, each ringing in ears inured to the melodies and stanzas, neither bringing comfort, only melancholy.
Grief’s vastness is challenged only by its specificity, the needle-like sharpness with which it penetrates on occasion.
A turn to softness, Grief lies wistfully next to me, touching me gently till tears spill from closed eyes, a momentary respite from the weight of vision, where consciousness and I meet, and I will myself forward, again.
For all Grief’s complexity it’s peculiarly obvious about its wanting, no air or guise to it at all.
Grief looks for my surrender, over and over, in amusement, cruelty or softness, it asks me continually to move closer and closer to something I cannot yet see, know or touch.
Grief’s threshold is an opening into a world I am curious but reluctant to claim entrance to, so unclear is what is to be lost or gained.
If Grief is an acquaintance, I might keep that peripheral closeness, as to make Grief a friend might require something of me I have no ability to access, a steadiness; solidity.
I prefer Grief proximally, space and distance a question of necessity.
Grief cannot live in these bones.
I really recognised the shifting faces of grief in this. Not just the heaviness people expect, but the way it appears in different guises — sometimes cruel, sometimes strangely gentle, sometimes almost curious.
The line about grief’s vastness being matched by its specificity felt especially true to me. How it can live in the background for a long time and then suddenly arrive with needle-sharp precision.
I also appreciated the honesty in refusing to romanticise it. That sense of keeping grief nearby but not wanting to call it a friend. There’s something very real in that boundary.
“Grief cannot live in these bones” is such a powerful place to end. It carries both resistance and survival at the same time.
This is beautifully written.
I was struck by the way you personify grief—not as an enemy exactly, but as something that moves beside us, sometimes cruel, sometimes strangely gentle, always asking something of us we’re not sure we can give.
That line about grief turning rock n’ roll into lullabies and poems into death metal is powerful. It captures how grief reshapes the world around us, even the things that once brought comfort.
Your closing thought lingered with me. Perhaps grief doesn’t live *in* our bones, but it certainly walks alongside them for a while, reminding us of what mattered enough to hurt.
Thank you for sharing this reflection. It’s one many of us quietly recognize.
Stay entangled, my friend.
—The Bathrobe Guy