Novel & Cerita Grief Isn't Linear

“I just... I can’t. Not yet.” “Hey,” he said gently, pulling me closer. “It’s alright. I understand completely.” “I want to,” I insisted. “I do. I just—” “Iris, stop.” He gave me a smile that was full of understanding and warmth. “It’s alright. I really do understand. I couldn’t talk about Elena or my parents for several years after her death. Hell, even now, just the mention of her name brings back all that pain. It gets easier with time, but it never goes away completely. Grief doesn’t disappear. It just… changes shape. You learn to live with it.”

"I know. And it's okay to miss him. To grieve. To ..to rage against how unfair this is. You're allowed all of it." "How long?" My voice was muffled against his shoulder. "How long until it doesn't hurt like this?" "I don't know." Honest. "Could be weeks. Months. Years. Grief doesn't follow timelines. Doesn't resolve neatly. You just carry it. Learn to live with it. Learn to.." He stopped. "Learn to honor it by living. Really living. Not just surviving." "I don't know how to do that." "Then we'll figure it out. Together. You and Dante and Luca and me. We'll-build something new. From the grief. From the loss. From " He pulled back. "From the ashes of everything Vincent destroyed. We'll build s

Would I have grown up knowing, really knowing, in the bone-deep way that Brynn knew it, that I was someone's first concern? I didn't know. I would never know. And that was the thing about grief that nobody told you, it didn't always arrive as missing. Sometimes it arrived as wondering. Sometimes it was just a doorframe on New Year's Eve and a father and a daughter and the quiet understanding of everything you'd had to build without a blueprint because the people who were supposed to give you one weren't there. I would not cry in this doorframe. I had decided. I blinked. Looked at the window. Took a breath.

“It’s okay to miss her, Dad. It’s okay to grieve. But there are healthier ways to cope with the pain.” He sighed deeply, setting the picture down and rubbing his eyes. “I just... I feel lost without her. It’s been so long, but the ache never really fades.” “Grief is a process,” I said gently. “It doesn’t have a set timeline. But you have to take care of yourself. Mom wouldn’t want to see you like this.” He gave a faint smile, one that barely touched his eyes but was nonetheless appreciative. “Thank you, Aria. I know you’re right. I just wish the pain would go away.”

His voice is low, thick, and raspy. I look him in the eyes, wondering how eyes so beautiful can be the cause of my nightmare? The pains I've experienced and how deep the wound I'm carrying is. See, the thing about grief is, there are different stages to it. The first is denial, you don't want to believe that the person is gone, that you're never going to have the opportunity to hug and kiss them, to hear their laugh, or watch them being themselves. You deny it and try to find consolation in the fact that, there's a tiny part of you that is, going to see the person again until you wake up and realize you can't. You won't.

Isa is just another nobody that doesn’t care if I die tomorrow. And those two corpses, oh how I miss them out of nothing. Why? Why am I grieving for you? Why do I care? Grief is like a ball in a mason jar filled with a single ping-pong ball. All this time, a fourth-dimensional hand keeps on shaking this jar, and every time the ball hits the glass walls of the jar it hurts. It fucking hurts so much. Why am I allowed to hurt?

The grief didn't hit her right away. In fact, it was three weeks after the accident when she felt it; But, it was not the strong and acute grief that she had prepared herself for, it was rather a gradual sickness which grief sometimes just chooses to have not the wave but the weather, not the event but the continuous atmospheric condition that changed the quality of everything it touched without being the thing itself.

He doesn't say anything for a while after that. I watch him sit with it. The specific process of grief when it finally gets access to something it's been denied for a long time is not clean or linear, it doesn't move through identifiable stages with clear transitions, it moves the way water moves when a barrier is removed, in multiple directions simultaneously, finding every available space. His jaw is set. His hands on his knees are very still. His eyes are doing the thing where they're not focused on anything external because all the available focus is directed inward.

Bullshit. There’s nothing linear about grief. No neat ladder. No checkpoint finish line. Only sudden starts and endless loops. The old me never understood this. Never thought about it. Never realized anger could stick to your bones like glue. Denial, bargaining, depression, acceptance they sound tidy, but they aren’t. You don’t graduate. You crash. You spin. You get stuck in one stage for weeks, then binge the rest in an hour. No stages. Only a hurricane. A shitstorm.

Same therapist who'd helped Eve after the soul transfer. "Grief is not linear," she told me in our first session. "You'll have good days and terrible days and days where you're not sure how you're still breathing. All of that is normal." "Nothing about this feels normal." "Because it's not. Losing your partner after everything you've been through together, after all the impossible situations you survived, it feels wrong. Like the universe cheated you out of the happy ending you earned." "Exactly that. We did everything right. Stopped Victoria. Saved the families. We won. But Eve still died and I don't understand why."