When Grief Doesn’t Look Like Tears
Why sorrow doesn’t always follow the rules, and how to honor your own way of mourning
When my mom died, I didn’t cry.
She was my best friend, my anchor, the person I was closest to in the world. If grief were logical, if loss followed any kind of rulebook, she would have been the one to undo me completely. But when she died, my eyes stayed dry.
I showed up at the hospital, the funeral, the calls, the casseroles. I handled what needed handling. People watched me like they were waiting for a collapse. Their questions hovered in the air. How is she still standing? When will the tears come?
They never really did.
Twenty years later, my dad died, and everything reversed. This time, there was no composure. The tears came constantly, without warning or permission. I cried while folding laundry. I cried in the grocery store. I cried in the car when the light turned green and the driver behind me honked. I cried when I saw someone at the post office who carried himself like my dad.
I cried until I felt emptied, and then I cried again.
I can’t explain the difference. I loved them both deeply. If anything, I was closer to my mom. Yet when she died, I closed up tight, and when my dad died, I broke open. That’s the thing about grief: it doesn’t obey logic. It doesn’t care about who you were closest to or how strong you think you are. Tears don’t arrive on schedule or prove themselves on demand. They come from the heart, not the head.
The problem is that we’ve been taught to expect something different. We carry an inherited picture of grief, one neat enough to be folded into a story. Cry when you hear the news. Cry at the funeral. Cry for a season, maybe a year. Then begin to move forward. The picture is easy to hold in the mind, but it isn’t how grief actually lives in the body.
Real grief doesn’t ask permission. Sometimes it comes as a flood of tears, sometimes as silence. Sometimes it doesn’t show itself for years, until a smell or a song cracks something open and suddenly your chest is splitting. Sometimes it moves like the weather, clear skies one day, a storm you didn’t see coming the next.
Our minds love order. They want grief to have a beginning, middle, and end. They want tears to prove that love was real. But the heart doesn’t listen.
The head says, This is the time to cry. The heart whispers, Not yet.
The head insists, You should be done by now. The heart replies, I’ve barely started.
Tears are not evidence. They cannot be argued into existence. They appear when the heart decides it cannot carry the weight anymore, and sometimes they don’t appear at all.
This is the kind of truth I write about often. If you want to keep walking through the raw, sacred, and deeply human work of grief and healing with me, subscribe to Bone & Bloom.
We like to imagine that tears are polite, that they’ll arrive in the moments we’ve labeled ceremonial. But they don’t follow ceremony. They don’t follow rules. They show up in parking lots, during commercials, when you stumble across a birthday card with their handwriting. They vanish when everyone expects them. They come in places you least want them and leave you dry-eyed when you thought they’d finally spill.
Sometimes they never come at all. And that absence can feel like a judgment. People whisper, Why hasn’t she cried? We whisper to ourselves, What’s wrong with me? Does it mean I didn’t love enough? Am I broken?
But tears are wild. They do not measure love. They only measure what the heart chooses to release in a given moment.
And grief has more than one language. Sometimes it is a long sigh at the end of the day, heavier than words. Sometimes it is the tightness in your chest, the hunger that disappears, the nights that stretch on without sleep. Sometimes it sharpens into anger, sudden and sharp. Sometimes it is silence, the body going still because anything else would unravel you completely.
If you didn’t cry, your grief is still there. It simply found another shape. In sighs. In fatigue. In rage. In silence. Tears are not the only dialect grief knows.
Other cultures have always known this. In some places, grief is sung aloud, keening and wailing until the walls shake. In others, it is silence itself that becomes the ritual. There are traditions of cutting hair, of covering mirrors, of lighting candles, of carrying stones. Grief has never belonged to one face, one gesture, one proof. It is only here, in a culture so afraid of death, that we cling so tightly to tears as the measuring stick.
So if you’ve ever wondered why your eyes stayed dry, know this: you are not broken. If you’ve wept for years and worried that it makes you weak, it does not. If your grief has shifted between silence and flood, that is grief too.
It is not the logic of tears. It is the love that remains. The empty chair at the table. The bed half-made. The laugh no one else knows how to echo.
When my mom died, I didn’t cry. When my dad died, I couldn’t stop. Neither way was wrong. Both were grief, alive in me in two very different forms.
That is the truth I keep circling back to: the head will always try to order loss, to make sense of it, to demand a proper shape. But grief doesn’t live in the head. It lives in the heart.
And the heart follows its own wild rhythm.
Tears will come when they come. Or they won’t. Either way, your grief is real.
Grief is not performance. It is presence. It is love refusing to leave quietly.
Love today,
Heather 🌸