15d • General discussion
The Grief No One Sees
People tell me I’m strong.
They look at me — standing, talking, functioning — and they see someone “doing okay.” They see someone who gets up every day and keeps moving. They don’t see the part of me that shatters. They don’t see the moments when the house goes quiet and my chest starts to ache in that familiar, unbearable way.
Because I don’t cry in front of anyone.
I’ve learned how to hold it in, how to smile and nod and make conversation while my heart feels like it’s splintering. I cry alone — in the shower, in the car, curled up in bed with the lights off. I save the tears for when there are no witnesses, when I don’t have to explain, when I don’t have to comfort anyone else’s discomfort.
Grief has become something I do in secret.
I talk to my son a lot. Out loud. In whispers. In my head. In prayers that are messy and unfinished. Sometimes I just say his name, because I miss the sound of it hanging in the air. I tell him about my day. I tell him I love him. I tell him I’m trying. I ask him to stay close, even when I can’t feel him.
And yet, talking about him to other people is so hard.
The moment his name is spoken in conversation, the tears rise up fast, burning the back of my eyes. I can feel my throat closing. My heart remembers everything all at once, and I have to fight not to break. It isn’t because I don’t want to talk about him — I do. I want the world to know him. It’s because talking about him opens the door to the pain, and sometimes the pain feels like it might swallow me whole.
Pictures are their own kind of landmine.
There are a few that I keep out, the ones I see every day. Those have become part of the room, part of the air, part of my routine. But the others… the ones tucked away… I can’t always look at them. It’s like my heart knows what’s coming and flinches in advance. And videos? Hearing his little voice — alive, happy, moving, real — breaks me open. It’s beautiful and brutal all at once. I watch, and for a moment he is right there, and then the ending hits me again like it’s brand new.
Grief is not just missing him.
It’s reliving it — over and over and over.
At this point, I’ve become so good at looking “okay” that even professionals can’t always see past the mask. I went to a therapist once, sat on the couch with my hands folded, doing what I always do — surviving on the outside while falling apart on the inside. She looked at me and said, “Well, you seem like you’re doing alright.”
I never went back.
I don’t think she meant harm. She just couldn’t see it. She didn’t see the way I hold my breath in grocery store aisles when I pass his favorite snacks, or how birthdays and holidays feel like walking through a storm with no shelter. She didn’t see that my strength is not lack of pain — it’s carrying it.
Every year on his birthday, we set off a huge fireworks display for him.
The sky lights up — loud, bright, impossible to ignore — and for a few minutes, it feels like the world is big enough to hold my love and my grief at the same time. Each burst of color feels like me saying, “You were here. You still matter. You are still celebrated.” It’s the closest thing I have to throwing my arms around the universe and begging it to hear me: He is loved beyond words.
And he is missed more than I could ever describe.
There are no sentences big enough for this kind of longing. There is no language that truly holds the feeling of reaching for someone who isn’t here anymore. I live between breaths, between waves of ache, between memories that hurt and memories that heal.
This is how I grieve:
Quietly. Deeply. Constantly.
In lonely moments and whispered conversations with my son. In the way I avoid pictures and replay his voice in my head. In the smiles I give the world while something inside me is breaking. In fireworks that tear open the night sky because love this big refuses to be small.
I may look “alright” sometimes.
But the truth is, I’m a mother who lost her child — and I carry that love, that ache, that forever-bond with me every single day.
And even through all of it, through the tears no one sees and the pain I can’t put down, one thing remains true:
I would choose him every time.I would choose being his mom in this life, no matter how much it hurts now.
Because the love is bigger than the grief — even when the grief is all I can feel.
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The Grief No One Sees
