Grieving, but Not Really

On distance, delayed grief, and learning there is no right way to mourn

It was the first sunny day after snowstorms in early December.

At 2 p.m. on a Tuesday, I was sitting at my desk when I saw a message from a relative in an extended family group chat.

“With heavy hearts, we share that our father has left us today.
Wednesday morning, we will walk with him one last time.”

I read the message again, and again, and again.
I read the name in that message, hoping the words would change every time I read it.

And then reality dawned upon me: my grandfather had passed away.

In an attempt to grieve the way I was expected to, my mind immediately began searching for memories, moments from the twenty-two years we had lived under the same roof. I waited for something sharp enough to make me tear up, something heavy enough to justify the loss.

But somehow, I could not think of anything strong enough to make me cry.

Sitting in my office chair, surrounded by emails and unfinished tasks, I could not make myself grieve the loss of a family member. The grief did not arrive the way I had been taught it would.

Even before I could feel it, I postponed it.
I closed the door to feelings and got back to work.

I tried to schedule grief the way I schedule everything else—like an event on my Google Calendar. I told myself I would go home later and do what I was expected to do. Cry, perhaps. Feel the weight of it. Become the version of a grieving granddaughter that made sense.

But that evening, guilt came before grief.

I felt guilty for not feeling bad enough. I wondered what kind of person remains calm when someone dies. I compared my stillness to the imagined sorrow of others and found myself lacking. It wasn’t sadness that scared me first, it was the absence of it.

Then came fear.

As I lay on my bed, silencing the background noise of my friends laughing in the living room, I feared that grief would arrive unannounced someday, at a time beyond my control. That on one of those gloomy, cloudy, cold days, when I wouldn’t wake up to sunlight spilling through my windows, when I would already resent having to go to work, I would look at myself in the mirror while brushing my teeth, and it would come. Demanding to be felt all at once.

Ever since I moved countries, this was the first time I received news of a family member’s death through a text. In the middle of a workday. The same way you receive a meme in a group chat. The same way my mom sends a good morning text everyday. The same way you watch a reel on Instagram.

I didn’t realize when the line between trivial notifications and the loss of a family member blurred. When both began arriving through the same screen, in the same format, demanding profoundly different kinds and amounts of attention.

I was scared that by the time I returned home, final goodbyes would have already been said. That my family would have grieved their share of the loss and reached acceptance. And that I would, for the first time in my life, step into an empty room and not see my grandfather there.

I was scared that by not being present for the last rites, by not walking that final walk, I would never find closure. That something essential had slipped past me because I was too far away.

And yet, after all the confusion, I felt a strange calm.

I found peace in the honesty of my reaction. I felt relief for my aging parents, who had spent the last few years tending to my grandfather. I allowed myself the freedom to hold loss the way I wanted to: quietly, intellectually, at a distance that felt both protective and unsettling.

I am learning that grief does not always arrive as tears. Sometimes it comes as guilt. Sometimes as fear. Sometimes as the unsettling realization that life continues, even when someone doesn’t.

There is no correct way to grieve. No timeline. No checklist. No ritual that guarantees closure.

This is how my body chose to hold loss—not loudly, not immediately, but truthfully. And perhaps that, too, is a kind of mourning.

Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash