I’ve always found grief to be an odd thing.

One moment, you’re a relatively functional member of society, making coffee, feeding your cat, remembering to wear pants. And then something happens. Someone leaves, or worse, is taken. And suddenly, the world forgets how to be the world. The coffee tastes wrong, the cat stares at you with existential pity, and your pants, well, honestly, who cares about pants anymore?

Grief isn’t a single thing. It can be large or small. It can be a tiny, incessant prickling in your side, not quite overwhelming, but noticeable all the same. Or it can be an ocean. A great, indifferent force that doesn’t care that you had plans today. It doesn’t knock. It doesn’t text in advance. It simply arrives, kicks down the door, and sits on your chest like an old god demanding a tribute. And the tribute is everything you ever valued. Everything you ever defined yourself as. Your personality, your intelligence, your competence, your ability to remember why you walked into a room. When grief comes along, it feels like everything that defined you is stripped away, leaving you an empty husk of who you used to be.

The ancient Greeks had a word for this kind of sorrow: penthos. Penthos was the Greek personification of grief, believed to favor those who mourned. It’s an interesting way to look at grief. The Greeks saw it as something divine, sacred, a visitor from the heavens rather than a clinical imbalance to be fixed with yoga and essential oils.

Looking at psychology, there are apparently stages to it. A psychologist a few decades back, probably while absentmindedly stirring a cup of tea, declared that grief comes in steps: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Which is fine, except, in my experience at least, grief doesn’t read psychology textbooks. It prefers chaos. One minute, you’re fine, walking in the mall. The next, you can barely breathe because someone wearing the same perfume as your loved one passed by.

Science has tried to study grief, as science does. Brain scans, hormone levels, clinical trials. And I’d say it’s done a pretty good job. However, beyond psychological/psychiatric study, there’s a way to look at grief that I’ve always felt resonated with me most.  In summary, grief is just love with nowhere to go. Your brain, having spent years lighting up at the sound of their voice or the way they mispronounced “quinoa,” now doesn’t know what to do with itself. So it sends out the signals anyway, but there is no one left to receive them. And that dissonance, that terrible misfire of expectation and reality, is what makes grief feel like the universe itself is broken.

Different cultures handle it differently. The Mexicans throw a party. The Irish throw a bigger party. The Victorians, being insufferable in all things, invented an entire industry of mourning fashion, complete with black veils and brooding by candlelight. In the modern world, we mostly just pretend we’re fine until someone asks, “How are you?” and then we burst into tears in the milk aisle.

Of course, people will tell you grief gets better with time. I’ve always disagreed with this. Grief does not “get better.” It doesn’t dissipate like a bad smell. To me, what happens is you learn to carry it. At first, it’s like hauling around an old, waterlogged couch; heavy, awkward, impossible to set down. But one day, it becomes something else. Not lighter, exactly, but familiar. A tattered coat you don’t mind wearing. You find ways to laugh with it. You let it sit next to you on the bus. You stop resenting its presence, because as much as it is pain, it is also proof that the person you loved was here. And isn’t that, in the end, kind of beautiful?

Grief is proof that love mattered. That a person, against all odds, left fingerprints on the universe. And the universe, despite its best attempts to remain an indifferent, swirling void, noticed.

So, you do what people have always done. You find a way to live with the pain. To carry the person in your heart as you go about life.

You make coffee. You feed the goldfish. You put on pants. And eventually, one ordinary Tuesday, you wake up and realize the world is the world again.

And that, somehow, you’ll be okay.