Blog

There is a particular kind of grief that arrives without announcement. No one brings a casserole. There is no bereavement leave, no socially sanctioned period of mourning, no ritual that says: this loss counts, and so does your pain. And yet here it is, sitting heavy in the chest of so many people I know — and perhaps in yours, too.

You have lived long enough to know that the world changes. You've adapted before. But this feels different — your grandchildren are laughing at something on a screen, and when you ask what's funny, the explanation only widens the distance. And somewhere underneath the confusion, there is something that feels a lot like grief.

There is a particular kind of report card comment that lives in the body long after the paper has been lost or thrown away. Not working to potential. Applied inconsistently. Could do better if she would only focus. But you were not choosing. You were trying with everything you had.

You are doing something ordinary — let's say you're making dinner — and a thought surfaces, the same one that's been surfacing for a while now. You bring it out, look at it, and you fold it up and put it back.

You have probably heard the phrase "treatment plan" and felt something tighten, just slightly. It sounds clinical. Bureaucratic, maybe. Like a form someone fills out about you and files somewhere. Like the opposite of the warm, unhurried conversation you were hoping therapy might be.

You’re standing in the card aisle. Maybe it’s CVS, maybe it’s Walgreens — somewhere fluorescent, somewhere you ducked in for something else entirely. And there they are: the cards. The ones with the watercolor flowers, the ones that say Every day I’m grateful to call you Mom. You scan them. You put one back. And then — quietly, in an aisle full of people doing the same thing — something in you just drops.

They've had the same argument so many times they could script each other's lines. One of them goes quiet. The other escalates. Neither of them wants this. Neither of them knows how to stop it. What changes when a couple finally understands that their dynamic has a neurological explanation.