A reflection on grief, bereavement and learning to carry love forward after losing someone deeply cherished. – AI generated image
AFTER writing about mental health, ageing and dementia, I find myself drawn to another subject we rarely choose to dwell on: death. Few of us willingly write about it. It is uncomfortable, easily postponed and often left for another day.
I have written before, somewhat cheekily, that much of life can be reduced to three milestones: hatch, match and despatch. We celebrate the hatch, fuss over the match, but prefer not to dwell too long on the despatch.
Read about it here. www.theborneopost.com/2025/09/13/reflecting-on-lifes-seasons-hatch-match-and-despatch/
Perhaps we should. I increasingly feel that death, too, deserves our discernment – not morbidly, but honestly, for myself and perhaps for all of us.
To contemplate death is not to live beneath its shadow, nor is it to invite it. Quite the opposite. It can sharpen our sense of what truly deserves more of us while we are alive – our time, our relationships, the conversations left unfinished, and those ordinary moments we too easily assume will always be there. It also invites us to reflect on something even less often spoken about: what happens to those who remain when someone they love is no longer physically beside them.
A recent reflection shared by a friend after the sudden passing of her husband made me pause. Death, I realised, has two chapters. There is the death itself, followed by the wake, funeral, prayers, condolences and farewell. Then there is everything afterwards. The first occupies several difficult days. The second can occupy the rest of a lifetime.
There is something strangely efficient about a funeral. Calls are made, relatives informed, prayers arranged, photographs chosen, people received and decisions made because they cannot wait. In the middle of shock, the human mind can become remarkably practical.
My friend told me the wake and funeral were, strangely, the easier part. Adrenaline supplied what the heart could not. There were things to do, so she did them. Then everybody went home.
The funeral had lasted days. The marriage had lasted 26 years. How does one organise the absence that follows?
Perhaps the hardest grief does not live at the graveside. It waits at home – in the empty chair, the unshared morning coffee, the missing messages and the instinct to tell someone something before remembering there is nobody at the other end.
A shared life, we discover, was not built mainly from anniversaries and grand declarations. It was built from Tuesdays – coffee, errands, traffic, grocery duty and the simple reassurance: “I’m on my way home.” Only when these disappear do ordinary moments reveal how extraordinary they were.
The world after someone dies
Grief changes the geography of life. The house is the same, but not the same. The road home is unchanged, but the person waiting at the end is gone. A weekend once anticipated can feel too long. A song, scent or old photograph can open a door in the heart without warning.
Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, written after the sudden death of her husband, captured the gap between knowing someone has died and still half-expecting the familiar world to resume. C. S. Lewis, mourning his wife in A Grief Observed, recognised another unsettling truth: grief can feel remarkably like fear.
Perhaps this is why grief is so exhausting. It is not simply sadness. It is learning to inhabit a world whose shape has changed.
At funerals, we often say, “Stay strong”. We mean well. But strength is not always standing upright. Sometimes it is getting out of bed, cooking for the children or returning to work because work gives the mind somewhere to rest. Sometimes it is admitting, “Today I cannot do very much.” Sometimes it is simply crying.
We often imagine grief as stages through which people should progress neatly. Real life is untidier. Bereavement thinking recognises that people can move repeatedly between confronting loss and attending to ordinary life.
Perhaps grief is less like a staircase and more like the tide. It advances and retreats. Just when we think the beach is dry, another wave arrives. That is not failure. A good day does not mean we loved less; a difficult day after several good ones does not mean healing has stopped.
Moving forward, not moving on
My friend described her journey beautifully. People speak of “getting back on the horse”, but the horse she had ridden for 26 years no longer exists in this physical world. So she walks – sometimes two steps, sometimes one, sometimes none.
There is wisdom in that. We often tell the bereaved to “move on”, but perhaps that is the wrong phrase. We do not move on from someone deeply loved as though closing a file. We move forward.
Moving forward allows the person who died to remain part of our story without trapping us in the moment of loss. Bereavement researchers call one aspect of this a “continuing bond”: healing need not require cutting every emotional tie with the dead. Physical presence ends. Love does not automatically end with it.
A father may reappear in his son’s mannerisms. A mother’s hands may seem to live again when her daughter prepares an old recipe. A husband’s favourite expression may unexpectedly emerge from his wife’s mouth. Sometimes those who have died return to us not as ghosts, but as character. We carry them forward in the people we become.
Healing, then, need not mean forgetting. It can mean remembering without being undone by every remembrance – learning that laughter does not betray the dead, enjoying a meal does not diminish love, and sleeping peacefully one night is not disloyalty.
Love does not demand lifelong misery as proof that it once existed.
Do not carry forty years today
One remark from my friend has stayed with me. She hopes to live into her nineties, to watch her two sons grow, fulfil their dreams and perhaps begin families of their own. Then another thought arrives: living into her nineties may mean another 40 years without the husband who expected to grow old beside her.
Grief has cruel arithmetic. Yet forty years should never be carried in a single afternoon. It is too heavy. Carry today. Tomorrow will come tomorrow.
Death does not merely remove someone from our present. It can also shatter a future we had quietly assumed. “We will grow old together” becomes “What does growing old mean now?” The identity of “we” must somehow make room for an “I” that never asked to return.
That may be one of grief’s deepest struggles. Healing cannot mean returning completely to who we were before, because that person belonged to a world in which our loved one was still alive. Perhaps healing means discovering, slowly, who we can become in the world that remains.
This is where hope must enter – but not cheaply. Hope is not pretending everything will soon be fine. Some things will never again be fine in precisely the same way.
Real hope is gentler and braver. It says life can still contain goodness without betraying the person who died. There can be birthdays worth celebrating even when someone is missing from the photograph. Children can still bring joy, friendships can deepen and laughter can return without asking permission.
Sorrow is part of the story, but it need not be the final chapter.
Faith, tears and the courage to remain
My own Christian faith gives me another layer of consolation. It does not tell me that tears are evidence of weak faith. At the tomb of His friend Lazarus, Jesus wept. Before the miracle came tears. That sequence matters to me.
Faith does not always remove sorrow. Sometimes it simply sits beside sorrow and assures us that sorrow is not the whole story. I believe death does not have the final word, and that those who have gone before us are held within a love and mercy greater than our understanding.
Others will express hope differently. Some find comfort in prayer, family, memory, nature or the good a person leaves behind. We need not settle those differences beside a hurting heart. Compassion usually speaks better than explanation.
Perhaps friendship with the bereaved matters most after the funeral. The flowers fade, visitors leave, work resumes and everyone else’s calendar moves forward. The empty chair remains.
So call three months later. Remember the anniversary. Invite them for coffee. Let the same story be told again. Do not become uncomfortable when the dead person’s name enters the conversation. Sometimes those grieving do not need advice. They need permission to keep loving someone whom the rest of the world has stopped mentioning.
Instead of “Stay strong”, perhaps there is a kinder sentence: “I am still here”. And perhaps that is one of death’s great lessons for those of us who remain. Grief is not the opposite of love. It is one of love’s consequences. We grieve because somebody mattered.
Love for the dead should not imprison the living. Those who remain must eventually laugh, work, celebrate, dream and love life again. But moving forward need not mean erasing what came before.
Love leaves fingerprints. It remains in children, stories, habits, values, gestures, recipes, jokes, photographs and the ways someone changed us simply by walking beside us.
So let the grieving walk – two steps when they can, one when that is all they have, and sometimes none at all. Sit beside them then.
Because when the funeral is over, love has not ended. It has simply lost its familiar form. And perhaps, with time, hope is learning that absence can change the form of love without erasing its presence.