The Timeline Is a Lie: There Is No ‘After’ Grief
Forget the five stages. The real path of grief looks nothing like the one we were promised.
I still reach for the phone.
It’s been twenty years since my mom died, and I still have the urge to call her when something big happens. A birthday. A heartbreak. A new project. My hand twitches toward my phone before my brain catches up. And then the ache sets in all over again.
Grief doesn’t play by the rules. There is no neat ending. No golden date where the grief expires. Just a new way of living with it.
The truth is, there is no timeline. Grief doesn’t follow stages or calendars or anyone’s idea of how long it “should” last. If you’re still waiting for it to loosen its grip, you have to know that you’re not doing anything wrong. The person you lost mattered. Of course, the loss rewired something in you. And maybe what you're living with isn't something to be resolved.
We’ve been sold a false map.
We’re told, quietly or outright, that grief is supposed to be a temporary state. A storm you weather. A chapter you close. Move on, move forward, find closure.
But grief doesn’t follow a calendar. It follows love. It follows memory. It follows moments. And those are forever.
When people ask, “How long does grief last?”, what they’re really asking is, “When will this stop hurting?” And I wish I could give them a satisfying answer. But grief isn’t a thing that ends. It’s a thing that reshapes.
Trying to shove it into a timeline only makes people feel like they’re failing at healing.
Grief is not a straight line. It's a loop, a spiral, a wave.
Some days, my grief is soft. A song on the radio that makes me smile through tears. A smell that brings me back. It taps me on the shoulder.
Other days, it knocks the wind out of me. Usually when I least expect it. Usually when I need her most. That’s when the weight comes back, like it never left.
It’s not that I have regressed; it’s just that she’s still gone, and sometimes that fact hits like a punch to the chest. Some days I carry it fine. Other days, it floors me. I think it means she’s still real to me. Still part of everything. And I still don’t know how to live in a world where she isn’t.
Grief has shaped every version of me since.
Healing hasn’t meant letting her go. It’s meant figuring out how to keep living while carrying her absence. Some days, that looks like strength. Other days it looks like exhaustion. But it’s never been about forgetting. Not even close.
My mother’s death split my life wide open. For my family, everything is marked by that divide: Before Mommy died. After Mommy died. We are not the same people we were before the loss.
When my mom died, I didn’t know how to process my grief. So I didn’t. I worked. I overfunctioned. I poured all of my ache into being productive, capable, and reliable. I became the one who held things together. That was the only way I knew to survive.
But surviving isn’t the same as healing. And it took me years to understand that. My grief lived under my skin, shapeshifting into anxiety, perfectionism, and emotional distance. It took its toll quietly. Until it didn’t.
Grief changes us. It rearranges our nervous systems, our priorities, our understanding of time and meaning. And healing doesn’t mean we forget who we lost or who we were. It means we learn how to hold all those versions of ourselves with a little more gentleness.
The myth of closure is one of the cruelest things we’ve inherited.
Closure is a word often thrown around by people who are uncomfortable with our pain. “Have you found closure?” “Don’t you want closure?” “It’s time for closure.”
But I don’t want closure. I want connection. I want continuation. I want to hold on to what’s left and honor what was, not seal it up in a box as if it never mattered.
Closure implies that love has a finish line. That your grief is a wound you just haven’t treated properly yet. That if you were doing it right, you'd be done by now.
Let me be clear: you're not doing it wrong. The people who expect you to be over it just don’t understand what grief actually is.
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So what if we made a grief map instead?
Not a checklist. Not a five-stage funnel. A map.
A grief map says: this is where the heavy fog rolled in.
This is the place I thought I’d drown.
This is the moment I laughed and felt guilty.
Here’s the spot where I started singing again.
And over there, that was the anniversary that undid me.
A grief map is about witnessing the terrain. It’s personal. Nonlinear. Ever-changing. It lets you see the paths you’ve taken, the places you return to, and the ones you’re still navigating.
You don’t need to be “over” your grief to be okay. You just need to stop expecting yourself to follow someone else’s rules about how long it should last.
Love today,
Heather 🌸
Journal Prompt:
What does your grief map look like right now?
Where do you feel like you’ve built shelter? Where do you still feel lost? What landmarks—memories, sensations, rituals—remind you of how far you’ve come?
If you’re longing for companionship in your grief…
Still Here: A Digital Grief Companion is part guidebook, part ritual, and part witness. It’s for anyone carrying long-term grief, fresh loss, or the unspoken ache of what might’ve been. Inside you’ll find written lessons, weekly journaling, gentle rituals, and guided meditations to help you move through grief without rushing it.