I want to say something careful about grief, because I think we get it wrong in both directions — those who perform it and those who suppress it.
When someone you love dies, something real happens in the body before the mind catches up. Tears come without permission. The breath changes. There's a particular quality of shock that precedes all understanding, and in that moment the only honest response is to let it move through you. I'm not asking you to be stone. I'm not interested in that, and neither is wisdom. There's a comeliness even in grief — a dignity that belongs to genuine feeling, that doesn't need to be either amplified or ashamed.
What I want to push back against is the other thing: grief extended past its natural term, grief that takes its cues from the audience, grief that becomes a way of demonstrating the depth of your love to people watching. Because that grief has quietly changed into something else. It's no longer about the person you lost. It's about you, and what you need others to see.
Let tears flow naturally — but do not command them.
Here's what I've observed: people cry louder when others are present. They grow quiet in private, then find the tears again when someone enters the room. I don't say this to accuse — the impulse is almost universal. But it means we should be honest about what's happening. The grief that requires an audience is not the purest form of grief. It's grief mixed with something social, something performed. And the performance, once started, tends to demand more from us than the actual feeling would.
The man who loses a child and returns to his work the next morning may love that child more fiercely than the man who tears his garments for a week. We can't know. What we can know is that the return to work is not evidence of coldness, and the garment-tearing is not evidence of depth. Genuine grief has its own duration, and it doesn't match the duration of the performance.
The dead are not served by our suffering. I want to say this plainly, because I think it's the root of much prolonged mourning — the sense that continuing to grieve is a form of loyalty, that to recover is to betray. But whoever you've lost is beyond the reach of your grief or your recovery. Nothing that happens in you now changes anything for them. What remains of them is what they left in you — the shape they gave your thinking, the memories that are genuinely yours, the ways you became yourself partly through knowing them.
These don't require grief to stay alive. They require memory. And memory, unlike grief, can be held without pain — can even be held with something close to pleasure, the particular sweetness of recalling a voice, a way of speaking, a gesture that was entirely theirs.
The past is ours, and there is nothing more secure for us than that which has been.
Cherish the memory. Talk about them. Let yourself be glad you had them. This is not betrayal. This is the truest form of keeping faith.
I know the loss of a child is a different register entirely, and I want to be careful not to smooth it over with philosophy. There is real grief here, and it deserves to be real. What I'm asking is only that the grief be yours — felt by you, for your own reasons, at its own pace — rather than a script borrowed from what grief is supposed to look like.
You know the difference. You can feel it in yourself: the moments when the loss simply rises in you, unavoidable and clean, and the moments when you reach for the performance because you don't know what else to do with the silence.
Stay with the first kind. Let the second kind go.
With love and no performance,