Making Peace with the Quiet

As I write tonight, it’s the picture of a quiet Fall evening: a fire crackling in the background, old episodes of The Waltons on TV (what...my youngest has all my Little House on the Prairie DVD's!) and a cat howling because she wants to go outside…again. My husband’s on swing shift, so most evenings it’s just me and the quiet, and I genuinely love it. I actually prefer it now. That stillness feels like an old friend now, but it took a long time to get here. For years, quiet was something I ran from.

After Robert died, my house was anything but quiet. I still had two girls at home, and most days my sister would load up her two girls and come spend the day with us. For four or five years, that house was a circus of giggles, shrieks, and little feet running down the hall. You couldn’t hear yourself think; and honestly, that was part of the point.

When those visits started to slow, we shifted the pattern. Most weekends were spent at Mom and Dad’s, where the noise came in different forms: clattering dishes, conversations that overlapped, and the comforting kind of chaos that says, you’re not alone here. I didn’t realize it then, but I was working hard to avoid quiet. Not intentionally, just instinctively. Silence felt like something to be outrun.

By the time the girls moved out, I had spent nearly fifteen years surrounded by noise, movement, and people to take care of. Then one day, the house stayed quiet. The kind of quiet that hums in your ears and makes you suddenly aware of how loud a clock can tick.

At first, I hated it. The silence felt sharp, almost judgmental. I’d turn on the TV just to drown it out. Even the dryer became company. But over time, the quiet softened. It stopped feeling like absence and started feeling like space. 

Grief changes the way silence sounds. In the beginning, it’s too loud, too full of memories you’re not ready to touch, so you fill it with noise and activity, anything to muffle the ache. But one day, you realize the quiet isn’t asking you to fix it - it’s just asking to be heard.

So if the stillness feels strange or too big right now, that’s okay; try to sit with it anyway. You don’t have to like it yet; just let it exist beside you. Maybe start small: five minutes of quiet before you reach for the remote, a cup of coffee without a podcast filling the space. The quiet will probably fidget at first, like a guest who doesn’t know where to put their hands. But given time, it settles in.

Eventually, it stops echoing what’s missing and starts reflecting what remains. The silence that once made you uneasy becomes something almost sacred. It holds your memories without demanding you relive them, and it gives your heart room to stretch again.

That’s the quiet worth keeping. The kind that doesn’t ask you to move on, just to breathe in the life you still have.