Part One: When Grief Changes the World We Know

I have been thinking about grief not only through my work as a therapist, but through my own experience of watching my mother age and decline in heath and cognitive awareness.

Sometimes I find myself wanting to pick up the phone and call her. I want to hear her voice, tell her something about my day, or simply have one of those familiar conversations that once felt so ordinary.

And then I remember that although she is still alive, the relationship has changed.

I may not know who I will find when we speak. There may be a moment when she is present and responds clearly, and another when she seems distant, unable to connect in the way we once did. I find my self wondering, Where is my mother in this moment? How do I reach her?

There is particular sadness in longing for someone who is still here. It is not the same as grieving a death, yet it is a loss of something deeply familiar: the way we know one another, the rhythm of our conversations, and the comfort of being able to reach for that connection.

I am sharing these reflections because I know that many people are navigating similar experiences, whether they are caring for an aging parent, living alongside serious illness or grieving someone who has died. My hope is that this blog offers a little understanding and perhaps helps someone feel less alone.

When Grief Finds us in Ordinary Moments

Grief does not always arrive when we expect it. It may come while we are listening to a song, looking at a photograph, or walking through a supermarket. A familiar scent, a favorite flower, or a melody from a film can suddenly bring someone we love into our awareness.

Sometimes the person has died. Sometimes they are still here, but illness has changed the relationship we once knew. We may find ourselves longing for familiar conversation, a shared moment, or simply the comfort of knowing they are there.

In those moments, we may wonder: Will I ever feel normal again? Will this grief lessen? Why does it still hurt so much?

There is no single timetable for grief. It can change over weeks, months, and years, and it may return unexpectedly. This does not mean we are failing to heal. It means that love, memory and loss remain part of our lives.

Why Grief Can Feel So Disorienting

Grief is not only an emotional experience. It affects the way we think, feel, sleep, relate to others, and move through our daily lives. When someone we love dies, becomes seriously ill, or changes through cognitive decline, so often the familiar world we relied upon no longer feels quite the same.

When Grief Awakens Other Losses

Sometimes, when we are grieving one loss, we find ourselves remembering others. A parent becomes ill, a relationship changes, or someone we love dies, and suddenly we may find ourselves think about an earlier breakup, a friendship that ended, a job we lost, or a dream that never came to be. We may remember a time when we felt abandoned, disappointed, or alone.

These memories can be surprising. We may have believed that we had made peace with those experiences, and perhaps we had. Yet a new loss can bring us into contact with feelings or memories that have been quiet for a long time.

This does not necessarily mean that we have gone backward or that our earlier healing was incomplete. Grief is not always confined to one event. Our experiences of love, attachment, separation, and loss are connected, and a significant change in the present may remind us of other times when life changed in ways we did not choose.

Sometimes simply recognizing that more than one loss may be present can us make sense of why our feelings seem so intense or complicated.

When Grief Changes the Way we Experience the World

Grief places considerable demands on our nervous system. During periods of intense emotional stress, we may find it harder to concentrate, remember things, make decisions, or think as clearly. Sometimes its described as "brain fog". Others experience moments of numbness, feeling detached, or a sense that what is happening does not quite feel real. This is actually a normal response to strong emotion/shock or being triggered; a flight or freeze response of the nervous system. Our emotional responses may also change from one moment to another. Sadness, anxiety, anger, numbness, and even moments of calm can coexist.

You walk outside and the sun is shining but you cannot feel the its warmth. You are surrounded by trees, yet you cannot quite take in their beauty or the life around you. The colors seem muted. You pass a flower, but its fragrance does not reach you in the way it once did.

Everything is there. Life continues around you, yet you may feel as though you are looking at it through a haze. When we are overwhelmed our attention and energy may become so occupied with what we are carrying that it is difficult to take in the world around us.

As a therapist, I understand that these experiences can be part of the way our minds and bodies respond to overwhelming loss. But understanding them professionally does not make them less personal.

Sometimes I know what is happening, and I still find myself standing in the middle of it, unable to make it feel different. There is not technique that can make me stop missing the mother I could once call so easily. What can help is learning to make room for the grief, rather than demanding that it disappear.

And often, to our unexpected surprise, gradually something begins to shift. You may not even notice when it happens.

One day, you walk outside and feel the warmth of sun on your skin.

The colors seem a little brighter.

You pass a rose, and suddenly you can appreciate its fragrance.

For a moment, you feel connected to the world again.

It does not mean the grief is gone. It does not mean you have stopped missing the person you love. It means that, alongside the grief, there is a beginning to be room for something else.

A little more breath.

A little more light.

A little more life.

When our Identity Begins to Shift

Grief can also affect ours sense of who we are. We may have understood ourselves as someone's daughter, son, partner, or caregiver in a particular way. When the relationship changes, we may find ourselves asking, who am I in this relationship now?

I have been experiencing this shift in my own relationship with my mother. There are moments when I am still very much her daughter, longing for the comfort and familiarity of the mother I have always known. It is not simply that I am losing my mother, it is that I am losing the person who has known me for my entire life. And there are other moments when I find myself taking on a more parental role, trying understand what she needs and how best to care for her.

This leaves me wondering, Who am I with my mother now, and who is she becoming? And how do I begin to accept this new reality?

There is also another reality that has become more present for me. My father died more than ten years ago, and I am an only child. As I watch my mother decline, I find myself facing the reality of becoming what is sometimes called an adult orphan.

It is a strange phrase, because I am an adult and have lived much of my life independently. Yet there is something profound about realizing that the people who knew us from the very beginning, who held our earliest memories and our place in the family, eventually will no longer be there. The people who knew me as a child, who remember the family stories, who held pieces of my history, will no longer there in the same way.

It is not simply that I am losing my mother. It is that I am losing the person who has known me for my entire life. The person I could call and say, Mom, do you remember...?" And she would remember. Or perhaps she would tell me a story I had forgotten.

There is something about having a parent alive that can make us feel, even as adults, that there is still someone abouve us in the family tree. Someone who remembers where we came from.

When that begins to change, we may find ourselves asking questions we have never had to ask before.

Who am I when I am longer someone's child in the same way?

Who holds the memories now?

Who do I call when I want to call home?

These questions do not have simple answers. They are part of the emotional landscape of grief.

Finding a Way Through Grief

One of the things I have learned, both personally and through my work with clients, is that grief does not follow a straight line. We may feel sadness, anger, relief, guilt, numbness, love, and even moments of joy. We many be able to function with more ease one day and feel overwhelmed the next. That does not mean we are moving backward.

It means we are human and this is part of our human condition.

The work of grief is not to stop loving or to forget. It is to find a way to live with what has changed, while allowing the relationship to continue, to grow and even expand in whatever form is still possible.

For some that may mean finding new ways to connect with an aging parent. For others it may mean learning how to carry the memory of someone who has died.

And sometimes it means allowing ourselves to say, with out trying to make it better.

"What is happening inside me right now"

"Can I allow this to be so?"

"This is so hard"

"I miss you"

"I wish things were different"

And the part that is longing or yearning "What does this part need most from me right now?"

Grief doesn't ask us to return to the life we once knew before, it often asks us to learn how to live in a world that has changed.

In Part Two, I will explore how we can begin to make room for grief, find support, and move through this experience with greater compassion for ourselves. Life moves through seasons, and not every season asks us to bloom. Some ask us to rest, some to endure, and some to trust that even in the stillness, life is quietly unfolding.