When someone dies, in the immediate aftermath, there is usually an outpouring of love and sympathy from family and friends. They send cards. They drop off casseroles. They hug you and reminisce about your mom or dad who died. But eventually it begins to feel like gradually everyone who was there to support you when the loss was fresh fades back and returns to their everyday lives. They go back to work. They can go to the grocery store without crying. They meet up with friends. They post smiling pictures on social media. Sometimes it can seem like everyone else has moved on from grief except for you.

I know this feeling so well. When my mom died in 2018 I was destroyed. I couldn’t breathe. My brother called to tell me, and when I hung up the phone, I sank to my knees and put my palms and forehead flat on the ground, pressing in hard. I didn’t know how I would ever get up again.

In the days surrounding her funeral, there were family and friends around me. They hugged me. They pressed their lips tight together and shook their heads sadly. They tried to say all the right things. They sent cards. They brought cookies. They spoke in solemn and hushed tones around me.

They did what they could, but it was clear to me that we were existing on different planes. I was shaken to the core. I was stopped. They were still moving, and to them this funeral and her death was an event to attend. Their grief had a start and an end. For me, this was something massive and irrevocable, an immovable object that I could not get past.

They went home and went back to their lives, and I kept grieving. After a while I felt like I was the only one who still remembered her. I was the only one who talked about her. I was the only one who couldn’t finish a sentence about her without choking up, without the tears coming yet again. I never went anywhere without a stack of folded tissues in my pocket.

I felt the loss of her around me always, like a shrieking sucking wind, like I’d imagine the air inside an airplane would be if a window broke–my world was foggy, the pressure and temperature changed, and I couldn’t breathe. Her death punctured the pressurized vessel in which I had been traveling, and yet it felt like everyone I knew was safely sealed behind thick plexiglass. How could they be fine? How could they have moved on?

I was angry and confused because it seemed like a lot of my family members stopped grieving. They who had spent so many holidays with my mom, or attended parties at my childhood home, who ate the food she cooked and received so much of her love and care. How dare they move on so quickly! I was sick and hurt when I posted on Facebook to remember her birthday, and their replies were merely “big hugs honey” or “I’m so sorry!” Their words felt thin and flimsy. I felt alone in my grief, as if everyone had moved on but me.

Unfortunately this happens when we lose our special person. Our love makes it special. Their love for us and our love for them makes them important. It makes our grief unique, and unfortunately it makes it much stronger than it will be for others. I have my own particular parcel of grief to carry. It is bespoke and heavy with the weight of our years together and the power of how much we loved.

I know my mother loved many people and was loved in return. She had many friends, touched many lives, and did great things for people. She was giving and caring. In the beginning I expected all of those other people to grieve like me and to be destroyed with me until the end of our days. I was deeply grieving and wanted to drag them along. Their happiness hurt. The fact that they could live again while I didn’t know how to go on stunned me. I pulled away from them and didn’t reach out or communicate. I couldn’t be with the living when my heart was with the dead.

I wish I could say there was a solution besides time. Time healing all wounds is a frustratingly slow concept. My solution was to shut them out. I hugged my children, held them tightly, and breathed in deeply with my face buried in their clean hair at bedtime. I built a protective shield around myself, and only let in those few friends and family who understood, who missed her, who reached out to me and seemed like they had an inkling of what I was experiencing.

You might be surprised who surfaces while you are grieving and who becomes important. You might be surprised who understands and who you discover that you can lean on. My sister-in-law and I now text each other the things we would normally send to my mom, the updates and triumphs of the grandchildren who are growing up without her now. And it is not my blood family, but rather my mother’s best friend from high school who writes to me regularly and sends cards packed with love, stories, and reminiscing for every holiday and birthday, because she knows my mother is no longer here to send those wishes herself. She remembers her, and knowing there is someone else who still loves my mom so deeply means the world to me.

After my mom died, one by one friends who also lost a parent reached out. It is a terrible club that I never wanted to join, but they understand, and it has brought us closer. We don’t even have to say much. They know how it is, like they were on board too, just a few rows ahead of me, when death punched a hole in the airplane window.

We were certainly prepared to love our person forever. We had it in us. We still have it in us. This is why it hurts so much. Our grief is the love from our past with our person. It is the love we will not get to spend in the future with our person. It makes sense that if we were fully prepared to love someone, someone so critical and important, for the rest of our lives, that we will not easily set down our grief and move on.

Carrying grief and living with grief can feel impossible at times. It can be such a lonely place. If you find yourself grieving and you don’t have people around you who get it, who understand a fraction of what you are going through, possibly it will help to know that there are others out there who do understand, who feel the same as you, and who are experiencing loss everyday. We are here. You are not alone. Whether your grief is new and constant from a recent death or whether it has been many years, we are all in this terrible club together.

Talk to me about your journey in the comments below. I would love to hear from you.