What grief actually feels like two years in. Not what people told me it would.

My mother died two years and three months ago. She was sixty-one. It wasn't sudden — there was a diagnosis, there was treatment, there was a period of hoping and then a period of accepting and then she died on a Tuesday afternoon in October while I was sitting next to her holding her hand.

People told me a lot of things about grief in the weeks that followed. Most of them were well-intentioned and most of them were only partially true. I want to write about what it actually looks like at two years, because the public narrative about grief seems to end much sooner than grief itself does.

What I was told

That it would get easier. (True, but not linearly.) That time heals. (Time changes — heals is the wrong word.) That I'd feel her presence. (Sometimes, which is both comforting and disorienting.) That there would be stages. (There were states, not stages — and they recur, they don't conclude.)

The thing nobody told me was that two years in, you can have long stretches where you feel almost normal, and then a Tuesday afternoon in October rolls around and you are suddenly not fine at all. The grief doesn't disappear. It changes shape.

The things I wasn't prepared for

The absurd triggers. A specific brand of hand cream. An episode of a television programme she would have liked. Hearing someone else's mother laugh at something in a shop. The world is full of small ambushes, and you do not learn to predict them.

The conversations I want to have with her. I notice things every week — things I would have called to tell her, questions I would have asked, news I would have shared. The list of things she doesn't know keeps growing and there's nowhere for that to go.

The strange guilt of the good days. When you have a day that's just a normal good day, there's sometimes a shadow on it — a sense that you're leaving the grief behind, that moving forward is moving away from her. Rationally I know this isn't true. Emotionally it's complicated.

What two years actually feels like

Different. Not better in the simple sense. Different. The loss is the same size it has always been — you don't shrink. What changes is that you grow around it. There is more of you now than there was in those first months, more life accumulated, and the grief is still there but it occupies a smaller percentage of everything.

I think about her every day. Not with pain every time — sometimes just with something that feels like ordinary love, directed at someone who isn't here to receive it. That love doesn't go anywhere. It just continues.

I don't have a tidy way to end this. Grief doesn't have one. That's part of what I wanted to say.