#5 - Grief

It comes without a knock. You don’t plan for it. One day, something shifts, and the air all of a sudden feels heavier.

I was five years old, living in South America. Our German Shepherd, Rocky, was my first best friend. He slept beside my bed, followed me everywhere, made me feel safe and seen. When we moved, we had to leave him behind. My parents said another family would care for him, as if. I remember hugging him, pressing my face into his fur, trying to memorise his smell. It was the first time I felt the kind of quiet that hurts.

I didn’t have words for it then. I only knew something good had gone missing and wasn’t coming back.

Years later, soon after graduating from Uni, I lost my job. I was twenty-one, still young enough to think time was endless. So I took a chauffeur job, long hours, paid handsomely, saved what I could, and used that money to get another degree. Losing my first job stung, but it didn’t scar. Grief, back then, was a light. It sat beside me but thankfully didn’t dig in.

Fifteen years later, it was different. I was thirty-five, married, a father with another on the way. Then the Asian financial crisis hit, and suddenly, the air felt thin. The same loss, but much heavier. When you care for others, grief carries weight. I remember watching my son sleep, my wife expecting our second, wondering how long we could hold steady. The same world, but a different gravity.

Grief never follows a pattern. It’s not polite enough for stages. Sometimes it lands, sometimes it dulls. Other times it wakes you at 3 AM without reason.

Years later, I met a couple on a motorbike tour. They were from England, riding across the world. The woman had stage-four cancer. A year to live, maybe less. I told them how I admired their resilience and strength. Her husband said, “It’s not courage. It’s really just acceptance.” That still lingers in me to this day. They used their grief as fuel. They didn’t fight it. They folded it into the days they still had.

It’s then I learned that grief looks for meaning. That’s its quiet job. When something we love leaves us, it leaves a hollow that keeps asking why. Some fill this with work, some with travel, some with noise. The trick, at least for me, was not to fill it too fast. To sit with that space a little.

When I see others grieve, I now know not to reach for answers. I’d never assume I have any insight, but I appreciate that empathy doesn’t require this. We aren’t built to fix each other, only to stand close enough so that silence won’t echo anymore.

If I could speak to my younger self — that five-year-old boy, the young man, the new father — I’d tell them that grief doesn’t end. It just changes form. It becomes quieter, wiser, less sharp, but it never leaves completely. Maybe that’s how it’s meant to be. The shape of what we’ve loved should leave a shadow.

Grief isn’t our enemy. On the contrary, it’s an affirmation of a heartwarming attachment, of caring, of time shared. It hurts because it mattered. And over time, it teaches us that nothing stays, yet everything will leave something behind.

That’s the part worth believing.

⸻

If this stirred something familiar, you’re not alone. In Australia, you can reach Lifeline 24/7 at 13 11 14.