Grief Is Strange

Day 157 – April 29,2026

Grief is weird as hell.

I know that is not the classic poetic framing people reach for. They want grief draped in velvet, looking out a rain streaked window, saying something profound about love and loss while a cello suffers quietly in the background.

Sometimes grief is that.

Other times grief is staring at the fridge like it personally failed you while your brain tries to process absence, memory, hunger, womanhood, death, survival, and the fact that Roger is somehow asleep upside down with one leg in the air like a taxidermy error.

That was closer to my day.

Because grief is not linear. Grief has no class. Grief has no respect for timing, dignity, productivity, or narrative consistency. It shows up however it wants, wearing whatever emotional outfit it grabbed off the floor, and then acts surprised when the rest of you is not prepared.

Today it moved strangely.

A little sadness. A little gratitude. A little disbelief. A few totally normal moments interrupted by the body remembering, oh right, something important has changed in the shape of the world.

That’s what makes grief feel so eerie to me. The way it doesn’t always arrive as devastation. Sometimes it arrives as a subtle wrongness. A quiet tilt in the day. A room that feels mostly the same and yet not at all the same because one particular soul is no longer moving through the world inside it.

That is a strange thing to carry.

And if I’m being honest, part of what’s weird about it is that life does not stop being stupid just because someone died.

That may be the rudest truth of all.

People still text weird things. Dogs still bark at invisible criminals. The body still needs food. The day still does that obnoxious little thing where it keeps going.

There is something almost offensive about how ordinary life remains while grief is trying to sit elegantly at the table and not spill red wine all over the center of your nervous system.

And yet that’s exactly what happened today.

Life remained.

Which is not a betrayal, I know. It just feels bizarre sometimes.

Because when someone beautiful dies, part of you wants the whole world to dim for a second. You want the air itself to show some respect. You want time to stop acting so unbothered. You want reality to at least adjust the lighting.

Instead, the sun still comes in. The coffee still needs made. The dog still has opinions. Someone somewhere is absolutely still behaving like a fool in public with total confidence.

Humanity remains committed to nonsense. And maybe that is what makes grief survivable too. Not the nonsense itself. The coexistence.

The fact that sorrow and absurdity are not opposites. They live together constantly. One minute you’re thinking about the soul of a woman who left an imprint on your life forever, and the next minute Roger is losing a debate with a pillow like he’s defending a doctoral thesis in household chaos.

How are you supposed to not laugh?

That’s not disrespect. That’s being alive.

I think people who don’t understand grief expect it to be clean. Solemn. Consistent. But real grief has range. It is elegant one second and fully unhinged the next. It can make you cry over something sacred and then laugh because your dog just snored so hard he startled himself and looked offended by his own body.

That’s what today felt like.

Grief with texture. Sadness with interruptions. Love still present enough to be funny around the edges.

And maybe that’s part of why I trust my own emotional life more than I used to. It doesn’t perform the “right” way. It moves like weather. It moves like truth. It moves like a woman who has lived through enough to know that no real feeling ever arrives one-dimensionally.

Roger, of course, remains an expert in the odd little overlap between comfort and chaos. He lay against me tonight like a heated weighted blanket with unresolved opinions, occasionally sighing as if he too was carrying the emotional burden of the week and not, in fact, just dramatically existing in fur.

I adore him.

And I think that’s the thing.

Even in grief, love remains funny. Even in pain, life remains bizarre. Even in mourning, the world remains populated by wildly unserious details that somehow keep the whole thing from becoming one long cathedral of sorrow.

Thank Goodness.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And grief, weird little shapeshifter that she is, still refusing to make herself simple enough to be boring.