“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it.”
——Elisabeth Kübler-Ross & David Kessler, On Grief and Grieving
I read this line on a Sunday afternoon, sitting on my kitchen floor of all places, eating cereal straight from the box because I hadn’t gotten around to buying milk. It stopped me in a way I wasn’t expecting — not because I was in the middle of any particular loss, but because I recognized something in it I’d been quietly arguing against for years.
I’d always treated sadness as a problem with a solution. Something to move through efficiently, check off, get past. This sentence said: that’s not how it works. Some things you just carry differently over time. I folded the page corner over and kept eating my cereal and felt, somehow, less behind.
Getting over it was never the point. Learning to carry it differently — that’s the whole work.