Who Started the Rumor That This Gets Easier?

I’ve heard it more than once, that grief gets easier with time. I've been waiting on that for over two decades.

It doesn't get easier; it gets normalized. There's a difference.

In the early years, grief is physical. Your body braces for it, the way you tense before a car hits a pothole you can already see. Certain dates, certain songs, certain ordinary moments that ambush you without warning. The impact is hard. You learn to expect it, even if that doesn't make it hurt less.

Further down the road, something shifts. It's subtle enough that you don't notice it happening. One year I passed my wedding anniversary to Robert because something else was happening that day. I realized it a day or two later. There was a little sadness, a little guilt, but nothing that knocked me sideways. I just remembered. That was new.

The bracing had become something closer to fond memory. Still present, just no longer a collision.

What doesn't change, at least not entirely, are the milestones. Watching our daughter grow up and experience all her firsts in life is its own particular ache. Graduations, new babies, ordinary moments that should have had more people in them. Time doesn't sand those down as much as you'd expect.

People around a widow often operate on an invisible timeline. They expect visible grieving for a while, then a gradual return to normal, then done. A year is the most common benchmark, which tells you how little most people understand about how this actually works. Grief doesn't consult anyone's schedule, and the people who've never carried it long-term aren't reliable guides for how to do it.

What nobody outside of it can fully see is that every widow finds her own version of normal. It doesn't look the same from one woman to the next. Some live with it close for decades. Some find that it genuinely loosens its grip over time. Most find something in between, a life that changes shape and still remembers what was lost.

Other people's discomfort with how long it's taking is not your problem to solve. You'll find your own pace, your own version of normal, your own way of living a life that still includes him. It won't look like anyone else's.

It only has to make sense inside your own life.

With Grace for the Mess,

~Stef