Grief and the Illusion of Lost Time

There is a misconception between grief and time.

Grief can push you into a time warp.

You feel that time is running out, and yet you can’t move through it. You can’t get going.

Grief has no master. It’s its own magnetic field. Pulling you in, even when you want to get out. Keeping you engulfed, even when you think you’re done.

And when you finally start to move from its clutches, you panic and realise all the time you lost to it. Desperately trying to get it back and force your way forward.

I’ve known grief in the form of lost family members, relationships ending, and jobs ending. Identity changes, status changes, international moves. The life you thought you would live. The future that you planned. Massive lifestyle shifts.

All cost. All hurt. All steal time.

Someone once said to me, grief is something you carry round. It never goes away, it just becomes smaller over time. You learn to live with it.

So how do grief and time get misconstrued?

Because grief distorts time.

It makes you believe you’ve lost time, when really you were just inside it.

Through all my experiences with grief, one thing has been consistent (besides pain), the loss of time.

I didn’t just lose part of me, or part of my life. I lost time to it.

There’s a trap in that perception.

Without realising it, you start to feel behind.

Grief compounds. You grieve the time you think you lost, looking back and realising how much was distorted.

It has you clambering to recover it. Panicking over time you think you lost to it.

And sometimes, if grief is delayed or glossed over, or you operate in high function like the Western world encourages, it hits you randomly on a Wednesday morning when you thought you were doing great.

Grief is complex.

It works separately from our mental concept of time.

Grief is an inevitable part of living. There is no shortcut through it. It’s an unknown period, for an unknown time.

Treat yourself with the compassion you’d show someone else grieving.

Let it consume you for a while, and give yourself a cut-off.

Maybe the time you think you lost to grief wasn’t lost at all.