Lessons in Grief and How Often to Cry (the answer is constantly)

Lessons in Grief and the Question of How Often to Cry (the answer is constantly)

This was originally meant to be a series of things I learned from my experiences with loss this summary, but that is asking for something far more coherent than I am capable of making right now. Each time I sit down to write this, my emotions are in a completely different place, and I am unable to order any of my thoughts. To some extent, I think that it fits this piece that it’s a little all over the place. Grief is all over the place, and I think to pretend I was put together would be a disservice. So if I seem all over the place, it’s because I am, and that’s okay, or at least I’m learning that it is. If I repeat myself or contradict myself, please bear with me. This list of lessons is messy because my mental state is fractured. Grief is not a linear path, and I will contradict myself because grief and life can feel so contradictory within themselves. I am torn between feeling everything and nothing at all. Things feel normal and completely different.

To summarize my recent experiences with grief, in 2025 I lost both of my grandmothers and my uncle. The first of the deaths, my paternal grandmother, was a 100 year old woman who was survived by nine children and seventeen grandchildren. She was a badass and a sweetheart, and as sad as I was, I wasn’t surprised to hear the news. It was a sad goodbye, but a celebration of a truly amazing life. The second loss, my maternal grandmother, felt like being punched in the face repeatedly by a cosmic force. Her death was slow and painful and wholly unfair. I find myself still full of rage and immeasurable sorrow that that was the end such an elegant and loving woman was granted. My dad’s only younger brother died three days after she passed. His life was marked by struggle, but all my memories of him are of his laugh. Truly I don’t think it’s settled in my bones that he’s gone.

With a painful summer nearly over, I find myself in the midst of all of the stages of grief. Even as I feel acceptance for my paternal grandmother, Gammy, I am wracked with sorrow over Nanny, and still in disbelief over my uncle. Sometimes I feel can’t believe any of them are gone.

Lesson 1: Nothing is right because everything is already wrong.

My therapist tells me that there’s no right way to grieve, that whatever way I’m feeling isn’t wrong. I want to believe that, but sometimes I’m not so sure I’m feeling anything at all. I don’t feel the intense sorrow that I think I should feel, at least not outright. Most days, I don’t feel anything really. Because I didn’t see them daily, my life isn’t all that different until I think about telling one of them something or visiting one of them soon and realize I can’t. In daily life, I can pretend I’m fine, and sometimes my body believes I am. Things continue on the way they used to. The world keeps spinning. And I can’t stand it.

Sometimes, I wish a gaping hole ripped open in the air. I wish something was irrevocably different and broken because how could the world keep spinning with them not it? How can I feel normal when people I loved with every breath are gone? Nothing is right anymore. Pretending it is feels like I’m failing to grieve them properly, like I’m telling the universe it didn’t matter. Sometimes I relive their deaths to try and keep them with me. Sometimes I can’t stand to think about any of it. None of it feels right.

Maybe in a way, there’s no right way to grieve because the world is wrong without them, so nothing is right.

Lesson 2: You’ll remember them in odd ways.

I feel Gammy in the wind sometimes, pushing me forward in a road race or sitting with me by her grave. She used to talk to me at night, she used to say. As she said her prayers, she would talk to her grandchildren. I wish I could hear her voice. I wish I could feel her more often.

I have yet to find a place where I feel Nanny, a fact that makes me want to scream. I feel her absence heavily.

I sit where you used to be,

Where I used to hear your footsteps down the stairs,

I would tiptoe up to your room to see if you were sleeping,

The last time I saw you in that room…you weren’t you,

The body was nothing but a shell, holding a spirit that could never be tamed,

Stop,

That’s not the memory I want of you,

I want to remember your smile,

I don’t want to remember the medicine pooling in your mouth,

Or when you stopped being able to talk,

STOP

I remember you telling me you loved me as I cried telling you that I loved you,

I remember sobbing in the room with you while my sister-in-law came to hug me,

I remember being so scared that final day that I had missed it and you were already gone,

I remember the nurse crying with us when you actually were,

NO

I remember you telling me you were proud of me

And all of your letters

And our chats around your kitchen table,

And bringing you mcdonalds or shake shack

I remember your cats coming to say goodbye - no

I remember you coming to watch my plays,

And the etiquette ‘lessons’ before thanksgiving,

I remember you putting names in the freezer of people you hate,

I remember you when I have a glass of warm milk,

I want to remember Y O U

Nanny’s loss is still very much an open wound. I drive her car everyday, the one she leant me so that I could visit her in the hospital. I miss her so much I can’t think about it for too long. I speak to her sometimes. I hope she can hear me.

I wish I could feel my uncle or know he was with me. More than anything, I hope that he’s watching over my dad. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel him. Maybe he’s just busy with others. I still remember the last time I saw him, and sometimes i think I see a guy with an odd gait and think it might be him. Maybe I can’t feel enough to feel a connection to anything to feel those I’ve lost.

Lesson 3: Let religion be whatever it needs to be for you.

This is something that I still struggle with, and I find it very hard to talk about it. Religion has often been where people look for answers in the midst of their grief. I was raised Catholic, but I grow increasingly disillusioned not with my own religion, but with people who use my religion to spread their own hate. For those reasons, turning to religion for comfort felt odd to me because I wasn’t sure how I felt about my own faith anymore.

Gammy was the most Catholic woman I’ve ever met. Being around her felt more connected to religion than going to the Vatican did. And even with every doubt I’ve never admitted to having, when she died, I thought she might have willed it all into truth. Every bible reading at her funeral felt fitting.

Nanny was more spiritual that outright religious, and a large part of me didn’t know what to do with that after her death. I prayed the rosary by her bedside, hoping that it might help her go to Heaven. But it felt like words rather than anything powerful. Moments before she passed, we turned on the radio in her room. Nanny always said she felt connected to Buddhism, and one of the nurses said that Buddhism requires music in order to pass on. I haven’t fact-checked that, and I don’t want to because I want it to be true.

My uncle was religious, and I helped give him a Catholic funeral, the way we thought he would have wanted. But I couldn’t help feeling like all the readings were wrong. Everything felt so formal and from so long ago. How could it connect to my uncle, who laughed like nothing could be that hard?

I don’t know what to take from my experiences with religion during these times. Part of me thinks I should go to church. Another part of me feels like a fraud.

Lesson 4: Find comfort where you can.

Andrew Garfield, while talking about the loss of his mother, said that he hoped his grief stayed with him because it’s just love he never got to express. In Fleabag, the narrator says that she has so much love for her own mother who passed, and she doesn’t know where to put it. Those sentiments are such a beautiful and poetic way of looking at loss. I love those ideas in terms of how they frame life and emotions, but in the midst of my sorrow, they don’t feel as comforting as I thought they would. Perhaps it’s because I lost my grandmothers and my uncle, and their statements refer to the loss of a parent, but grief for me doesn’t feel full of love. It feels uncanny, like the world has changed in a way that I can’t stand.

The hardest hitting of the losses, although I hate to put anything resembling a ranking on personal tragedies, was that of Nanny. Nanny, my penpal whenever I moved abroad for stretches of time, used to send me messages that she loved me and that she believed in me. I had planned to live with her over the summer to help take care of her. Instead, I religiously visited her hospital room until it turned into her deathbed. It was a complication from a blood clot surgery that took her, and I am still filled with such anger at the hospital that could not save her however irrational that is. That isn’t to say that there weren’t lovely doctors and nurses taking care of her. The nurse who was there when she died cried alongside us and brought us tissues. I more blame the idea that doctors and nurses must work insane shifts and still perform their best. It’s a systemic issue, but knowing that doesn’t make it hurt less.

I don’t let myself think of her death often. It rips my world in half to picture it. Everyday more devastating than the last, yet we soldiered on if only so that we could keep her comfortable and knowing that she was loved. Her final act of love was to smile at us as pain shut her body down. Ours was to hold her hand through every minute of it. She died surrounded by my mom, my aunt, and myself. I told her everything I wanted to. God, I wish she was still here.

I’m aware that this is a bit of an overshare. But when I was five, my grandfather died, and my mom had us write letters to him. We tied those letters to balloons and floated them up to Heaven. This is a version of that. An expression of my love and pain to send into the void that is the internet. One day soon, I’ll write a letter just for her. Until then, this makes me feel a little less alone.

When to Cry:

Most days, I feel empty and numb, bordering on lifeless until I realize that tears are only a blink away. If I think of any of them for too long, the tears start to flow until I’m wracked with sobs.

I want to cry over them. Crying makes it feel like I loved them well, like I still do. Crying seems like what you should do when life rips away the people you love. I often refer to lesson 1 to tell myself it’s okay to let the grief come slowly, but secretly I want it to swallow me.

When my uncle died, I didn’t cry. I couldn’t. I had cried every day for weeks leading up to Nanny’s death. There was nothing left in me. Even as I planned his funeral, wrote his obituary, and his eulogy, I waited for the big breakdown to hit and I hated that it didn't. I hate that feeling numb makes everything feel normal. Because I want there to feel like there was a big change.

People say that it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all, so it must be better to feel than to be numb.

Cry. If you can. All the time. Because it meant something. And it’s a less lonely hell than floating in limbo with dry eyes. Writing this article or whatever it is has made me cry, and I feel closer to them.

But this is not the story of a beaten down girl telling you to cry because she can’t anymore. This is someone learning how to grieve and how to understand that my lifewill still have smiles and laughs even though I’ll never hear my grandmother’s quips, or my uncle’s jokes, or see Nanny’s smile.