THE LIONESS GRIEF

There are some things in life that no one prepares you for. You can read every book on grief, listen to every sermon, even have people who love you surround you with prayers and comfort but when it happens to you, when death comes close enough to steal someone you love, the world stops making sense.

It doesn’t matter how strong you thought you were. Nothing prepares you for the emptiness of knowing they are gone. Not gone to the shops, not gone to sleep, not gone on a short trip. Gone. Forever.

It’s a strange kind of ache, one that settles not only in your heart but in your bones, in your skin, in the way you breathe. You find yourself waking up in the middle of the night reaching for your phone, thinking of texting them, and then remembering: there’s no one on the other side anymore.

The silence screams louder than anything you’ve ever heard.

People tell you to “be strong” as if grief is something you can swallow down and forget. They don’t know that sometimes the only place you can cry is in the shower, where the sound of the water hides the sound of your breaking. You stand there, water rushing over your face, and let it all out the screams you can’t let your family hear, the sobs you’re too ashamed to let your friends witness. The shower becomes the only safe place to grieve. Because when you step out, you have to wear the mask again.

You smile. You say “I’m okay.” You go about your day. But inside? Inside you are carrying the weight of a ghost.

The cruelest part of grief is not just the missing, but the remembering. The way little things betray you. The smell of their favorite food, the sound of a song they loved, a random stranger with their laugh. You feel your chest tighten, your throat close, and for a moment you forget they’re gone. For a moment, your brain tricks you into believing you’ll see them again. And then the reality slams back, heavier than before.

I think what hurts most is not even their death itself, but the thought of all the life they’re missing. The milestones they won’t be here to witness. The conversations you’ll never have. The hugs you’ll never get. You find yourself bargaining with the air, whispering, “Please, just one more day. Just one more chance.” But the air is empty. No one answers.

Some days, it feels like the grief has dulled, like maybe you’ve learned how to carry it. You even catch yourself laughing, and then suddenly the guilt hits. How dare you laugh when they’ll never laugh again? How dare you live when their life was cut short? Grief plays this cruel game it wants you broken, but when you try to heal, it makes you feel guilty for healing.

The truth is, grief is not something you “get over.” You don’t heal from losing someone you love. You learn to live with the hole in your chest. You learn to carry the absence. But the love never dies, and because the love never dies, the grief never does either.

Sometimes late at night, when the world is quiet and everyone else is asleep, you whisper their name into the darkness. You hope that somehow, someway, they can still hear you. You imagine them smiling, watching, holding you in a way you can’t feel. It’s all you have left.

The thought that crushes me most is this: I will never see them again. Never. Not tomorrow. Not in ten years. Not in this lifetime. That kind of forever is unbearable. It leaves you hollow. It leaves you wondering what the point of anything is, because the person you wanted to share it all with is gone.

So you cry. You cry in the quiet, in the shower, in your pillow. You cry because love that deep doesn’t disappear it just has nowhere left to go.

Grief is the shadow of love. And the deeper you loved, the darker the shadow.

But maybe just maybe that shadow is proof of how much they meant. Proof that their life, even though it ended, left something eternal inside of you. Because grief, for all its cruelty, is love refusing to let go.

And so we live. Broken, bruised, carrying our ghosts. We laugh with tears in our eyes. We keep their memory alive, even when it rips us apart. We find ways to keep going, even though every step is heavy.

Because as much as it hurts, the truth is simple: we would rather feel this unbearable pain than to have never loved them at all.