The Grieving Brain Novels & Stories

He walked up to me with an encouraging smile, he placed his hands above mine. “Now, it’s until we see them again. And until then, no matter how painful it is, we have to keep our heads up. Grief is really just love with no where to go. To feel great loss, you have to had known great love. And I’m thankful for the love. And the love is what will carry us on.” I sniffed and hugged him. Like Vicki Harrison said, “Grief is like the ocean, it comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes, the water is calm and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.”

He was still learning the difference. "She snored," he said. "Not loudly. Just — present. A small sound that meant she was there." He paused. "I could hear it through the wall when she slept. I used to stay awake to listen to it." "And now?" "Now I remember it without it hurting first." He said this with the care of someone reporting something recently discovered. "For two thousand years, remembering her meant the hurt came before the memory. The grief arrived and then behind it, barely, the person." He looked at the garden. "Now the person arrives first. And the grief comes behind it, smaller, and then it passes."

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.

We know that it does. He thought about the room that felt wrong for the funeral reception. He thought about grief as a between-time condition — the person in grief in the between-time between the before and the after, the loss not yet resolved into the new condition, the attending person in the gap. He thought about the funeral reception as the between-time gathering — not the same between-time as Raymond's Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday, but the same structure: the people gathered in the gap, the room required to hold them.

1%. "It’s not fading, Alexander," Elena said, her voice dropping into that haunting, dual-toned resonance. She didn't turn around. She didn't have to. She could feel the heat signature of his body standing in the doorway, the steady hum of his luxury watch, and the frantic, uneven rhythm of his heart. Alexander stepped into the room, his boots clicking softly on the hardwood. "The doctors said the ghosting would be intense for the first seventy-two hours. They said your brain is still trying to 'handshake' with the fragmented code Lira left behind."

I have lost all connection between my brain and body. This is what grief does, I can already feel myself slipping back into that dark void I spent my teenage years in. Dark memories crash into my mind both myself and my wolf no longer able to confine them into the dark recesses of my brain. Painful memories of my past flood in, swirling with this live memory as I start to sink under the pressure of it all. “There has to be another way.” Jaxon growls out, turning to the doctor just as Doctor Abel walks into the room.

my therapist gently prodded, sensing my hesitation. "I feel lost... and I miss her," I whispered, my eyes welling up with tears as memories of Xanthe flooded my mind. "Grief is an unavoidable and natural part of life. At some point, we will all experience the pain of losing someone we love, often in circumstances that can feel overwhelming and devastating," my therapist offered, her voice soothing and empathetic. As I struggled to contain my emotions, my chest tightening with the weight of my grief, I took a deep breath and let out a heavy sigh. The memories of that fateful night still lingered, causing a lump to form in my throat and tears to stream down my face.

Alex wrapped his arms around me from behind and I felt his brothers close ranks around us, felt pack bonds humming with support and love that made the grief slightly more bearable. "I'm sorry," I gasped between sobs. "I'm sorry I'm falling apart." "You're not falling apart," Alex murmured against my hair. "You're grieving, there's a difference." "He's been dead for three years," I protested. "I should be past this." "Grief doesn't have a timeline," Liam said gently. "It hits when it hits regardless of how much time has passed." "And you never got to properly grieve before," Jayce added. "Never had a grave to visit or closure about what happened, so it makes sense it's hitting hard now."

Isla’s POV Grief is a strange thing, people think it fades with time. They say things like healing and closure as if loss behaves like a wound that eventually seals itself shut. They’re wrong, some grief doesn’t fade. And lately…mine had started breathing again. I sat cross-legged on the floor of my studio office in Fairview, surrounded by paper. Actual paper. Printed articles, old newspaper clippings, sticky notes, police summaries. Coffee cups I had forgotten to throw away.

She looked at me for a long time, her expression unreadable, and I waited for her to say it was okay or that she understood or that we could take a break. Instead she said, "You can grieve or you can train. You can't do both at the same time. Pick one and commit to it for the next hour." "That's not how grief works." "That's exactly how grief works when you're trying to survive. You give it a time and a place and you feel all of it and then you put it down and do what needs to be done. You can pick it back up tonight. But right now I need you here, not three hundred miles away in a room with two men who aren't coming for you."