09/19/2026
Someone told me once that grief is just love with nowhere left to go, and I don't think I understood it until I saw what grief actually does to an ordinary person.
There’s a woman I know who still sets an extra plate at the dinner table. Sometimes she catches herself doing it and just stands there, looking at the empty place. Forty years of setting the table for two doesn't disappear just because one person isn't sitting there anymore.
And maybe that's what grief is. The heart knowing someone is gone, while the hands are still waiting for them to come home.
But you see, we often talk about grief as though it's something that has gone wrong. Something you're supposed to work through, get over, eventually put down. But I'm not sure deep grief is a sign that something is wrong. Maybe it's proof that something was very, very right.
Nobody aches like that for someone who didn't matter. Nobody keeps setting an extra plate because they had nothing better to do. You do it because for years, someone belonged there.
I think about the people who feel embarrassed by how long they've been grieving. The ones who still cry unexpectedly. Who still reach for their phone. Who still hear a song and have to leave the room for a minute.
I wish I could sit beside them and say: you don't have to be ashamed of loving someone so much that their absence still hurts. the ache isn't a wound refusing to heal. It is love still looking for somewhere to sit.
Where there is deep grief, there was great love.
And perhaps that's the kindest thing we can say to someone who is hurting, not that it will get better, or that they need to let go.
Just that the size of the grief tells us something about the size of the love.
