Joy and sorrow walk hand in hand, and we often treat them as two sides of the same coin. Some days life leans toward joy, other days toward sorrow, and we accept both as natural parts of being human. But grief feels different from either of them. It does not entirely belong to sadness, nor is it simply the absence of happiness. Grief feels more like the rim of that coin, the sharp edge we rarely notice until life presses it against us hard enough to leave a mark.
Perhaps that is why grief is so difficult to explain. Happiness announces itself loudly. Anger burns visibly. Sadness asks to be comforted. But grief moves differently. It enters quietly and begins rearranging your inner world before you even realise something inside you has changed. One day you are functioning normally, caring about routines, conversations, appearances, and the perception of people around you, and then suddenly none of it feels as important anymore. The things that once occupied your mind lose their urgency overnight.
Grief is a strange emotion because it shuts off the conscious beliefs of the mind. The body continues existing externally, responding to people, attending places, finishing responsibilities, but internally there is a constant spiraling taking place that nobody else can fully see. And maybe that is what grief truly looks like, an internal collapse hidden inside a composed body. People often imagine grief dramatically, as endless crying or visible breakdowns, but grief is rarely that linear. Sometimes it cries loudly and sometimes it becomes frighteningly silent. Sometimes it turns into anger, sometimes exhaustion, and sometimes complete numbness. There are people carrying unbearable grief while replying to emails, sitting at dinner tables, laughing during conversations, or travelling to work every morning. The world sees functionality while internally something has already fallen apart.
I often wonder whether grief exists in different degrees. What if certain forms of grief are simply too large for the human body to emotionally contain? Perhaps that is where numbness begins, not because the pain disappears, but because the mind can no longer continuously process something so immense. There comes a stage in grief where perception loses meaning entirely. The opinions of people, social expectations, and even your own carefully built identity begin fading into the background because the grief itself becomes bigger than all of it.
It feels like being placed inside an enormous unfamiliar room. A room so large that you do not know where to sit within it. You remain near the entrance for a while, almost convincing yourself that you can still leave if you try hard enough. Then you consider sitting in a corner, hoping the feeling shrinks with time. But eventually you realize grief does not disappear simply because you avoid looking at it directly. It waits patiently for acknowledgement. Most people never speak about this part of grief, the stillness of it. The waiting. The silence. The strange emptiness that exists between memories and reality. Because grief is not only about losing someone. That is tragedy. Grief begins afterward. It begins in ordinary moments- in routines, suddenly noticing absences where presence once existed so naturally that you never imagined life without it.
People leave, but the impressions they leave behind continue existing everywhere. In certain songs, certain timings, certain phrases, certain corners of a room. And perhaps that is what makes loss unbearable, not simply death itself, but the continuity of memory after it. The world continues moving with terrifying normalcy while internally you are trying to understand how something so permanent has happened.
Vedant Saxena’s Journey: Crafting Stories That Touch the Heart
Death, to me, feels like the greatest teacher humanity will ever know. Not because it immediately gives wisdom, but because it forces confrontation. Yet writing about death is infinitely easier than experiencing what it leaves behind. When tragedy truly enters a life, language itself begins failing. People offer comfort in different ways. Some offer philosophies, some offer distractions, some offer prayers, and some simply sit beside you in silence because they understand there are emotions too heavy to be solved through conversation. But grief remains deeply personal despite being universally experienced. Every individual carries it differently. Some people become quieter, restless or drown themselves in routines just to avoid sitting alone with their thoughts. And maybe routines are not always avoidance. Maybe routines are survival.
I also think grief changes our relationship with faith. When something exists beyond human control, people eventually turn toward God, whether in devotion, anger, confusion, despair, or surrender. Not always because they become religious, but because grief pushes human understanding to its limits. There comes a point where logic stops comforting us, and maybe faith begins exactly there. Not in certainty, but in helplessness.
The hardest part about grief is that nobody can truly tell you when it ends because perhaps it never fully does. Maybe grief simply changes shape over time. Maybe humans do not move on from loss as much as they slowly learn how to carry it without collapsing under its weight every day. And somewhere in the middle of all this, writing becomes important. Because the body cannot endlessly store emotions without release. Eventually feelings demand somewhere to exist. Some people release grief through prayer, some through conversations, some through silence, and some through art. Writing, however, feels different. Writing allows grief to breathe without interruption. It asks for nothing except honesty. It becomes a place where confusion does not need immediate answers and pain does not need immediate healing.
P.S. Perhaps this is my way of learning how to sit beside grief instead of trying to outrun it. Writing may not be peace itself, but sometimes, it feels like the closest thing to it.
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