Grief ages you
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Grief ages you, not in the way years carve lines into your skin, but in how it etches itself into the core of who you are. It stiffens your spirit, bends your shoulders under its weight, and leaves you hollowed in places that once felt full. Time slows when you carry it, each moment dragging like a long shadow at sunset. You move differently, speak in softer tones, as though the volume of the world is too loud for your wounded soul.
It’s not just the absence that haunts you, but the moments left undone—the unsaid words, the unheld hands, the laughter that echoes in the chambers of your memory but never returns. You learn to measure your days by the ache of what no longer is, and in doing so, you become someone else. A version of yourself that knows the fragility of everything.
Grief doesn’t simply change you; it undoes you, and in the unraveling, it asks who you will be now. Will you let it consume you, or will you let it shape you into something raw but resilient, broken but somehow beautiful?
Each day becomes a reckoning, a silent confrontation with the reality of their absence. You look in the mirror and see eyes that know too much, hands that tremble with the memory of holding what is gone. The world outside continues to spin, indifferent to your stillness, and yet you find yourself clinging to the tiniest things—a scent, a song, the way the wind moves through the trees—because they carry whispers of what you’ve lost.
Grief doesn’t just live in the past; it invades the present, colors the future, and reminds you that healing isn’t a straight path. Some days, the ache will feel like an old friend, a familiar presence that you’ve learned to carry. Other days, it will blindside you, crushing you beneath its weight as though it’s brand new. But even in its heaviness, it teaches you something you didn’t know before: that love is the thread connecting you to what was, what is, and what will always remain.
Do you feel like grief has aged you? How do you feel about aging since your loss? Have you become more resilient, or has grief made you more fragile? Maybe it’s a bit of both?