The Map of My Grief

The Map of My Grief

I never knew grief had a shape until I started walking through it. People say time heals, that loss softens, that you learn to live around the empty spaces. Maybe that’s true for some, but for me, grief became a place. A strange country I never planned to visit, let alone live inside. And in that country, I had to learn the roads by heart, because every step I took kept leading me back to my parents.

My mother, Elsie Hurst. My father, George Hurst. Their names still feel too big to fit in one sentence, because they carry an entire life inside them. My life.

If I were to draw a map of the last few years, it wouldn’t look like roads or cities. It would look like moments. Sharp ones. Quiet ones. The ones that still wake me in the middle of the night because they refuse to be forgotten.

The first shape on the map would be the hospital waiting room. The chairs lined up like soldiers. The fluorescent lights that made everything feel colder than it already was. The moment they told me there was nothing left to do. That memory stands like a mountain, impossible to climb, impossible to walk around. I still stand at its base some days, looking up, wondering how I made it past it at all.

A little further along on the map is the silence. The silence in the house the first night after they were gone. No kettle boiling. No familiar footsteps. No voices drifting from room to room. Just the weight of air that didn’t know what to do with itself. Silence, I learned, doesn’t stay in one spot. It spreads. It crawls. It fills every corner until you breathe it in without noticing.

Then there’s the road that leads to Christmas. Every year since, I take that road, even when I don’t want to. Christmas used to be warm. It used to glow. Now it comes with an ache that sits just under the ribs, the kind that doesn’t leave no matter how many lights are switched on. On the map, Christmas looks like a long frozen river, stretching out in front of me, and I walk across it carefully, afraid the ice might crack beneath the memories.

But the biggest landmark on the map is the moon. The moon has become the place I speak to them. Some people pray. Some people visit graves. I look up. The moon feels steady, patient, gentle. Some nights I talk to it like it has all the time in the world, like it knows how to carry the weight of everything I can’t say out loud. I ask it to hold them. To tell them I still love them. To tell them I haven’t forgotten anything.

The map also has winding paths—ones I walked alone, ones I didn’t tell anyone about. The days when the grief came like a cold wind, catching me off guard. The nights when I felt older than I ever should have. The mornings when I woke up and remembered they weren’t here, and the day already felt too heavy to touch.

But there are softer roads, too. Memories that don’t hurt as much as they used to. My mother laughing the way only she could. My father’s calm steady presence. Moments that sit like wildflowers in the middle of all that rough ground. I didn’t plant them there. They just grew, stubborn and beautiful.

If you looked at my map from far away, you’d probably think it was a mess—lines crossing each other, roads that lead nowhere, rivers that appear without warning. But when I look at it closely, I see something different. I see love. Love that stretched itself across an entire life and kept stretching even after the people it belonged to were gone. Love that didn’t disappear. It just changed shape.

Grief, I’ve learned, isn’t a straight line. It’s not a journey you complete. It’s a place you learn to live inside. Some days the roads are clearer. Some days I get lost all over again. But every path, whether painful or gentle, leads me back to the same truth: I had parents who loved me. I had a family that shaped me. And losing them didn’t erase any of it.

If I could draw the final part of the map, it would be a small circle of light. A place where I sit with the moon and speak their names, not with the same breaking as before, but with a kind of steady peace. Grief doesn’t go away, but it does make room. And in that room, love stays.

And at the end of my map, that light becomes something more. It stands for my final destination, the place where the road I walk now eventually meets the road they took before me. A light that waits. A light that doesn’t dim. A light that promises I will see my mam, Elsie Hurst, and my dad, George Hurst, again. Not in memory. Not in dreams. But in heaven, where every path finally joins, and every lost voice is found again.

That is the map I carry. Not on paper. Not in photographs. But inside me, where every road still knows the way home.