Grief Moved In. Am I Losing My Mind?
GRIEF AND HEALING
Grief did not knock. It moved in and filled every room, and it did strange things to my body and mind. I share what those early days were like, the fog, the numbness, the heaviness, along with what others and those who study grief have taught me, so you can stop fearing you are losing your mind.
Nobody sent me a warning before grief arrived. There was no knock, no polite letter, no chance to tidy up first. One day my life was my own, and the next, grief had moved in, settled across every room, and made itself at home in the middle of everything.
For me, it did not sit quietly in a corner. It rearranged the furniture. It followed me from room to room. It showed up at the breakfast table, rode along in the car, and lay down on the other side of the bed at night. For a long while, grief had the run of my whole house, and I did not know how to ask it to leave.
I want to share what that season was like, because so much of my early grief was made harder by a quiet fear that something was wrong with me. What steadied me, once I understood it, was learning that I was not losing my mind. I was grieving, and grief does strange and heavy things to a body and a home. I have heard the same from many others since, and those who study grief will tell you as much.
My grief was never a clean, tidy sorrow. It was a tangled one, threaded through with regret and guilt and a good deal of anger. If your grief is tangled too, if it does not look like the calm, dignified mourning the world seems to expect, I hope it helps to know that mine did not either.
Much of what grief does, it does to the body, and here the experience of others taught me more than my own understanding did. People who have grieved often describe a tiredness that sleep does not touch, the kind that settles into the bones and stays. They speak of a chest that feels tight, of the literal ache that gave us the word heartache. Appetite can vanish, or food can lose its taste. Sleep can run from you at night and then flatten you at noon. None of that is weakness. Grief is labor, and the body knows it, even when the mind cannot explain it.
For me, the heaviest part was the fog. I drifted in and out of it, disconnected from my own life, as though I were watching it through glass. People moved and talked around me, and I nodded in the right places, but part of me was standing somewhere else entirely. I vacillated, swinging between raw emotion and a strange numbness, feeling everything one hour and nothing the next. I could not always tell which was worse, the pain or the blankness where the pain should have been.
Time bent in strange ways too. An afternoon could crawl while whole months slipped past unaccounted for. It was a couple of years before the fog began to thin, and I have since learned to be patient with how long that took. Grief keeps its own clock, and it does not ask our permission.
I have come to believe that none of this was a sign of a broken mind. The fatigue, the fog, the numbness, the sense of watching from behind glass, the way a familiar room can suddenly steal your breath. I understand now that these are the honest weight of love with nowhere to go. Naming them took away some of their power to frighten me, and I have watched that same relief settle over others when they finally hear that what they are feeling is normal.
I could not evict grief in those early days, and forcing it only wore me thinner. What I could do, and what others walking this road have found as well, was learn to live in the house while it stayed. I drank the water even when I was not hungry. I rested when the fog rolled in. I let people sit with me in the too-quiet rooms, even when I had no words for them.
Grief moved into my life uninvited, and it did not ask permission. But I can tell you, from the far side of those early days, that it does not always take up every room. Little by little, it learns to leave space for you again.
For now, if you are living in that house too, be gentle with it. And be gentle with the one still living in it.
That one is you.
"When the fog rolls in and the rooms feel strange, do not be afraid. You are not lost. You are only learning to live in a house that grief has rearranged, and in time you will find the light switches again." -Haynes
Related Stories
Beyond the Veil Living 2025
Subscribe To Our Monthly Updates
Notes for the Path
Gentle words, new stories, and a reminder you are not alone. No clutter, ever.
We care about your data in our privacy policy.