Grief Doesn't Miss a Milestone

Yesterday I went with my daughter to her live ultrasound. She's due in June and watching the technician navigate around her belly while the baby dodged the probe like he had somewhere better to be, I felt it. Robert would have been sitting right there, cracking jokes, marveling that his "little poopy" was about to become a mother. He would have had a lot to say. He always did.

I wasn't blindsided. I didn't fall apart. I just felt his absence flutter in, the way it does when something big happens and the person who should be there, isn't.

That's how grief truly moves for most of us who are years out. It's not a wave that crashes and retreats and leaves you recovered on the other side. It runs underneath everything, present most days in a way you don't notice, until something happens. A milestone, a song, a grandchild dodging an ultrasound probe. You feel it again because you loved someone deeply, and that doesn't just file itself away when the funeral is over.

Widows, especially younger ones, sometimes panic when this happens. They've worked hard, built something resembling a life again; they're laughing, functioning, making plans, and then one ordinary moment catches them off guard and they assume the whole thing has started over.

It took me a while to stop being surprised that it would keep happening. A lot of widows hit year two or three still expecting a steady upward climb toward better. When that doesn't happen, they wonder if they're doing something wrong. They're not.

The reason it keeps showing up is simple: it's situational; it follows the shape of your life. When your life changes, when it grows or shifts or marks something new, grief is right there to note the absence. It's nothing if not consistent.

Grief isn't an illness you recover from. I've said that before and I'll say it again, because it hasn’t stopped being true. It resurfaces at every major life event for the rest of your days: graduations, weddings, the birth of grandchildren, random Mondays that happen to fall on a birthday or an anniversary. What changes over time is your capacity to handle it without being flattened.

In the early months, the weight is almost unbearable because it's everywhere at once and you have nothing built up yet to bear it. Further out, you develop a kind of strength that grief, for all its damage, is very good at building.

It’s still there, but you're stronger than you used to be. The same weight feels different on a body that's had years to adjust to it.

Milestones are the hardest triggers because they pull in two directions at once. You're celebrating something real while mourning the person who should be there; that tension is permanent; what changes is how much space it takes up. The good things still happen, and we get to be happy in them.

My grandson will never meet his grandfather. That's a grief all its own. Watching that baby dodge the probe, already looking like he’ll be a busy boy, I could almost hear Robert laughing. That's grief doing something other than damage for once.

The work is learning to let grief show up at the milestones without letting it take the whole room. It showed up at that ultrasound. I let it sit for a minute, felt the familiar ache of his absence, then watched my daughter's face while she watched her baby move.

That’s what moving forward actually is: refusing to let grief have the last word.

With Grace for the Mess,

~Stef