You're Allowed to Feel All of It: Sad, Mad, Numb, Even Years Later

There's a feeling that shows up sometimes that you don't have language for, but if it had a button, you'd press it.

It's the unsubscribe from grief feeling. The one where you don't want to be sad anymore. You don't want to be the person whose person died. You don't want the conversations, the looks, the calendar dates, the weight of carrying this every day. You're tired. Not even a noble tired. A flat, customer-service tired. Take me off this list. I quit. Pick someone else.

You feel it for about ninety seconds.

And then the second wave hits, which is worse. How could you want to forget this part. How could you want to put it down. This is them. This is the love. This is the only thing you have left of them and you just tried to hand it back like a return at Target. What is wrong with you.

You're still in the same chair. You haven't moved.

And then the third wave hits, which makes no sense at all alongside the first two but shows up anyway, which is the rage. You did this. You left. You're the reason I'm sitting here trying to unsubscribe from a feeling I never asked to subscribe to. I didn't sign up for this. You signed me up for this and then disappeared.

Two minutes. Three feelings. Each of them contradicting the last. Each of them real.

If you've had some version of this and walked away thinking something is wrong with me, I want to be the first person to tell you something. Nothing is wrong with you. That two-minute sequence is one of the most honest descriptions of long grief I know. The unsubscribe impulse, the shame about the impulse, the rage at the person for putting you in the position to feel any of it. All in the same chair. All within the same breath.

This is how grief actually moves. Not in stages. Not in a queue. In a mob.

Welcome. You're allowed to be here.

The grief script you were handed

There is a script for this. You know it because you tried to follow it. The script says: cry a lot in the beginning, then cry less, then cry on the anniversaries, then eventually cry only when prompted. There are stages. They have an order. One day you graduate.

Whoever wrote that script never lost anyone.

The truth is messier. Grief doesn't move in stages. It moves in weather. Some days are humid and heavy. Some days are clear. Some days you're inside a storm cell that came out of nowhere and the rest of the world is sunny. Some days you're sitting in a kind of weather that doesn't even have a name.

This isn't only true for widows. It's true if you lost a parent. A sibling. A child. A best friend. A version of yourself. Any griever who tried to follow the script and felt like they were failing it. The test wasn't real. The grades aren't real. The graduation isn't real.

What's real is whatever you're feeling right now, no matter how late in the timeline, no matter how off-brand for someone who's "supposed to be doing better by now."

This article is the permission slip for all of it. Especially the parts you've been hiding.

The unsanctioned emotions

Let's name them. The ones nobody puts on the inspirational grief graphic.

Boredom. The day you got tired of being The Griever in every room. Tired of your own sadness. Tired of the topic. The day you wanted to talk about literally anything else and felt like a monster for it.

Relief. The shameful, quiet, unsayable kind. Relief that the worst already happened, so it can't happen anymore. Relief about something practical that you'd never say out loud. Relief at not having to carry a thing you were carrying before they died, even if you'd carry it forever to have them back.

Rage at the dead person. Not metaphorical anger. Not "anger as a stage." The actual fury that they left. That they made the choices that led to this. That they're peacefully nowhere while you're still here cleaning up.

Indifference. A whole afternoon, sometimes a whole day, where you didn't think about them. And then the guilt of having forgotten, like the forgetting was a betrayal worse than anything else you've done.

Wanting to laugh at the wrong moment. Something dark passing through your head at the funeral. A joke they would have loved while everyone else was crying. The almost-laugh you swallowed because the room wouldn't have understood.

Lust, or wanting, or appetite. Sometimes early. Sometimes shockingly early. The body waking up before the heart got the memo. A want that felt obscene next to the loss, but came anyway, because you are still alive and your body knows it.

Hatred for the people checking in. The friend who texts every Sunday and you're starting to dread the buzz. The relative who keeps asking how you are with that voice. You know they mean well. You hate them anyway, sometimes, in private, briefly. And then it passes.

Joy. Real joy. Early joy. Joy that felt like trespassing. The first time you laughed so hard your stomach hurt and then you remembered and the laugh got stuck halfway out.

Numbness years out. Not the protective numbness of the first weeks. A different one. The kind that shows up on a regular afternoon two or three or seven years in, lasts a few hours, and goes away on its own. The kind that doesn't mean you've stopped loving them. It just means you're tired.

Every one of these is allowed. Every one of these is real grief. Every one of these has been felt by every griever who ever lived past month six, whether they admitted it to anyone or not.

If you've felt any of them and quietly hated yourself for it, this is your permission slip. Stop hating yourself. Start letting them through.

The same hour, all the feelings

Here is what nobody describes accurately about long grief: the emotions don't take turns. They show up together.

You can be at a dinner feeling genuinely happy, missing them so violently you can't breathe, irritated at the person across the table who keeps bringing them up, hungry, calm, ashamed of the hunger, present in the conversation, half a mile underwater, and grateful all at once. In the same minute. In the same breath.

This is not a malfunction. This is what a full human being feels when they've lost someone who shaped them and are still alive.

The earlier grief content you read probably told you these feelings would come in sequence. Sad, then angry, then bargaining, then accepting. Like a queue at the DMV. They don't queue. They mob. They show up six at a time, contradicting each other, refusing to settle, and your job is not to sort them. Your job is just to keep breathing while they're in the room.

You'll be in the middle of the best week you've had in months and a smell will catch you off guard and the floor will slide. You'll be in the middle of the worst week and a stupid moment of joy will hit, a song or a dog doing something or a stranger making you laugh, and you'll have a choice. You can let yourself have it. Or you can push it away because joy in a hard week feels like cheating.

Have it. Always have it. Joy in a hard week is not betrayal. It's evidence you're still in here.

The emotions don't take turns. They show up together. Six at a time. Contradicting each other. Refusing to settle. Your job is not to sort them. Your job is to keep breathing while they're in the room.

Years out, on a regular Tuesday

People assume that once enough time has passed, you're "doing better." You are. You're also not.

You're doing better in the sense that you can hold the thing now. The grief hasn't gotten smaller. You've gotten bigger around it. There's room for more in your life. Friends who never knew them. A practice. A move. A trip that wasn't on any plan you ever made when they were alive. A version of yourself they never met.

You're also not doing better in the sense that they're still gone, and you still notice every day, and the noticing has just become quieter. Less of a scream. More of a hum. The hum doesn't go away. You stop expecting it to.

The waves still come. They're rarer. They're sometimes harder when they hit because you're not braced for them. You forgot to be a griever that morning. You were just a person. The wave reminded you. You'd built a day where they weren't the first thing, and the wave is the price of having built that day.

That's not a regression. That's the shape of the long version of this.

The line you can put in your pocket

Here's what I want you to take with you, no matter where you are in this. Three months. Six months. Two years. Five years. Twenty.

You're not feeling it wrong. There is no wrong way to feel this.

If today you're devastated, you're allowed to be devastated. If today you're numb, you're allowed to be numb. If today you're laughing in a way that doesn't fit the calendar, you're allowed to be laughing. If today you're so angry at them you could spit, you're allowed to be angry. If today you're bored of being the griever, you're allowed to be bored. If today you wanted to press an unsubscribe button on the whole thing for ninety seconds and then hated yourself for wanting to, you're allowed to feel that too.

There is no graduation. There is no test. There is no version of you that crosses a finish line and gets to put grief down in the trophy case.

There is just you, today, feeling whatever you're feeling. And that is the right grief. Yours. The one nobody else can do for you and nobody else gets to grade.

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I love you. I am proud of you.