Grief Didn’t Shatter Me—It Hollowed Me Out Slowly

Grief Didn’t Shatter Me—It Hollowed Me Out Slowly

There’s a lie we often tell ourselves about grief. That it’s a single, explosive moment—a violent wave that crashes into us, breaks us open, and then recedes. But that wasn’t my experience. Grief didn’t shatter me in some cinematic burst of emotion. It didn’t arrive with sobbing in the shower or screaming at the sky. It came slowly. Quietly. Like a whisper that never stopped. Like erosion.

It hollowed me out piece by piece.

At first, it was the silence. After he died, the world didn’t seem quieter—I did. I moved through my days like I was underwater, muffled and distant, as though the version of me that used to laugh, speak freely, and take up space had been gently packed away. I answered questions at work. I replied to texts. I even smiled at the grocery store cashier. But none of it reached me. I was going through the motions with a mouth that belonged to someone else.

People around me kept asking if I was okay, and I kept saying, “I’m managing.” That wasn’t a lie. Managing, for me, meant functioning just enough to avoid worry. It meant keeping the pain small enough that others wouldn’t flinch. I didn't want to be the person who made a room go quiet.

But grief had patience. It didn’t need to be dramatic to be devastating. It waited.

In the weeks that followed, I began losing things I didn’t realize I’d counted on. My appetite. My sense of direction. My memory, which had once been sharp as a tack, now failed me in mundane ways. I’d walk into rooms and forget why. I’d stare at emails, rereading the same sentence five times. I couldn’t keep track of conversations. I wasn’t falling apart—I was simply thinning out, like fog in the morning sun.

And then came the hollowing.

I didn’t know how to describe it at first. It wasn’t sadness, exactly. It was the absence of everything else. No joy, no anger, no hope, no real fear—just a vast internal quiet, as though someone had gutted the inside of me and left the shell intact. I could still joke. Still meet deadlines. Still post on social media. But I wasn’t in any of it. I was living beside my life, not in it.

Grief, I’ve learned, doesn’t always need to break you down to change you. Sometimes it just needs to remove you.

The worst part was how invisible it felt. No one sees a hollowing. People expect grief to look like tears and breakdowns. But mine looked like answering emails on time. Like walking the dog. Like remembering to water the plants. It looked like a life continuing normally—only it wasn’t normal at all.

Eventually, the guilt crept in. Guilt for not crying enough. Guilt for functioning. Guilt for not falling apart when everything inside me had changed. I wondered if I was grieving wrong. If I was broken in a different way than people expected.

But here's what I’ve come to believe: Grief is not a performance. It’s not supposed to meet expectations—especially not your own.

Some grief is loud and eruptive. Some of it is silent and slow. Mine was like a leak in the roof—you don’t notice the damage until the ceiling starts to cave in.

The hollowing stayed with me for a long time. Long enough that I thought maybe I’d never feel anything deeply again. I didn’t rush it. I couldn’t. Time didn’t heal anything, but it revealed things. I began to notice small flickers—tiny signs of return. A book made me laugh. A friend’s hug lingered longer. A song stirred something.

The shell was still there, but something inside it started to stir.

I won’t pretend I’ve returned to who I was before. That person—the one untouched by this grief—is gone. But slowly, a new version of me emerged. A person who understands that pain isn’t always loud. A person who’s learned to sit with the quiet ache instead of outrunning it. A person who knows that hollow spaces don’t stay empty forever. Sometimes, they make room for something unexpected—like resilience. Like softness. Like grace.

I never “got over” the loss. I integrated it. Like a tree that grows around a broken fencepost—it doesn’t reject the wound, it absorbs it. And still, it grows.

Grief didn’t shatter me. It hollowed me out slowly.

And in that space, I began to rebuild.