How long can you grieve? In the beginning, immediately following the death of your parent, openly grieving is expected and socially acceptable. But as the months and years pass, your friends and family might start to wonder a little when you will be done with grief. Grief persists, and it can make others uneasy or uncomfortable. When will you be done with grief? When will you be over it? Is this even possible?

Your family and friends may have the best intentions. They want you to return to life, to feel and show happiness again. They might offer quick fixes for how you might move on or tell you what they think would help your grief to resolve.

You might notice this pressure to hurry up and be happy increases around the holidays. Special occasions and holidays can be some of the hardest days for those of us who are grieving, and yet the people around us want to see us smile and enjoy the celebrations. I know how hard it can be to smile while you feel the twisting pull of pain inside.

My mother’s fourth death anniversary is coming up this summer, and in social settings I’m starting to hesitate to talk about my grief or her death. I sometimes wonder if bringing up these topics with friends isn’t really okay anymore. Will they think I am making an excuse for not being more available? Maybe they will be annoyed that the conversation with me so frequently returns to the topic of my dead mother.

It’s true that people who have not experienced a deep loss may think some of these things. This falls into the category of something we should let go. My mother would say who cares what other people think?

At a holiday gathering just before Christmas, I felt that pull to smile and laugh with friends. The hosts had decorated their home and set the table. They set out the good cheese and fancy crackers, along with bourbon old fashioneds and specially selected wine. The children’s laughter and bubbly conversation flitted from room to room. Internally I criticized myself. Why can’t you just enjoy this?

In order to move forward in life, we who are grieving must hold on to the past and honor our deep loss while simultaneously welcoming new joys. This can often feel like being pulled in opposite directions. It can be so hard to keep going.

While I am very much an introvert, socially I am a chronic talker, endlessly over sharing details and stories, positively brimming with self-deprecating humor. This is likely because of my neurodivergent brain and several years away from other adults in isolation as a stay-at-home mom. I have anxiety and want people to like me. I want to pass as normal, but usually end up appearing distinctly awkward, goofy, and weird.

Lately in social settings when I feel the sting of grief, I’ve been trying not to fall back on putting on the brave face, smiling and saying nice things while curling up in pain inside. I don’t want to devolve into a stand-up comedian at dinner, making people laugh while my tears swell in the background, waiting until I’m home alone later to spill over in private.

While I know that a holiday dinner at a friend’s house is not the place to let my three years of grief take center stage, I also cannot leave it at home. I wore my mom’s wedding band on a gold chain around my neck and also the ring she gave me with two opals, one for each of my children. I brought her with me for Christmas.

While my instinct is to talk loud enough to cover and hide my grief sometimes, this year I decided that instead I would attempt to listen. To be quiet. To practice stillness. Instead of letting words and stories rush out, I simply stopped talking and looked around me. I tried to be thankful that I had people around me for a holiday, especially after all we have been through with the pandemic.

After dinner I sat off to the side with one of our very gracious hosts, while everyone else munched on a tray of cookies–molasses rolled in sparkling sugar, oatmeal with M&Ms, and those peanut butter ones with the Hershey’s kiss in the middle.

My friend asked if I was thinking of my mom, and then she poured out stories about her father, who died an unexpected death shortly after my mom. She talked about the way he died, how illness painfully destroyed such an honorable, strong, good man. The unfairness of it all.

Though we were across the table from each other, in that moment her grief membrane reached out to mine and the synapses fired just enough to allow a tiny pulse of energy to cross the gap. We both knew and understood the weight of grief. Like two magnets that find one another and snap together, we carved out a safe space for our grief on the holiday table.

I don’t know what my grief will look like at five or ten or twenty years. But at three and a half years, no, I am not done. And it is okay if you are not done either, no matter when your parent died. We carry our grief with us because we carry memories and love for them in our hearts.

It’s perfectly okay to smile and feel a little sad at the same time. Take a deep breath and hold on. Just remember to look up every once in a while and look around you. This is the new me. And the new you. Come on in. It’s nice to meet you.