Grief doesn't always look the same.
A little while ago, at around six weeks after my surgery, I had a night where I unexpectedly cried.
Not because I regretted having the surgery.
Not because it wasn't the right decision.
I cried because I finally allowed myself to understand what it meant.
A chapter of my life had quietly closed.
I'll never grow another baby.
I'll never wonder, "What if?"
Before surgery, I'd packed those thoughts away. I think I needed to. There were appointments, decisions, recovery and all the practical things that needed my attention.
Then, once my body had begun to heal, my heart apparently decided it was ready to have its turn.
The grief surprised me.
I wrote about it at the time but never shared it. And then life kept moving, as it does.
Now our family is experiencing grief of a very different kind.
We've had a death in the family. Someone who played a pivotal role in the life of someone we love deeply. Our own relationship with him wasn't especially close, but that doesn't mean his passing doesn't matter to us.
We will say goodbye. We will support the people who loved him. And we will honour the place he held in their story.
It has brought me back to those words I wrote weeks ago.
Because grief is complicated.
It doesn't belong only to one kind of loss, and it doesn't always arrive when we expect it to.
Sometimes we grieve a person.
Sometimes we grieve a chapter.
Sometimes we grieve a future that will no longer happen.
And sometimes we find ourselves grieving because someone mattered enormously to somebody who matters enormously to us.
Those things aren't the same. They don't need to be compared.
But perhaps they remind us that grief is really an acknowledgement that something mattered.
I'm now almost ten weeks on from surgery.
I still know, without question, that it was the right decision.
And I still think about the woman who cried that night at six weeks.
Both things can be true.
Maybe that's something I'm learning about grief.
We don't always need to fix it, justify it or decide whether we're entitled to feel it.
Sometimes our hearts just need a little time to catch up with what life has already changed.
💚