This is a personal piece about grief in motion, the kind that begins before anything actually ends. Before the loss is real. It lives in the days when everything is still happening, technically fine, but you feel like you’re standing in the middle of a collapse. It touches on panic, helplessness, and the terrifying love you feel when someone close is hurting. If you’re in it too, I’m writing to meet you there.
There are mornings when I wake up and the first feeling is dread. Not panic, not even fear, just a dull, steady dread that wraps itself around my throat before I’ve even moved. I lie there for a few seconds, maybe a minute, and wait for it to pass. It never does. It just reshapes itself into something manageable. Something I can carry into the day.
It’s not grief yet. That word is too final, too post-event. This is something else. It’s living in proximity to loss, close enough to smell it, not close enough to name it. There is no vocabulary for this part. It’s the before. The waiting room no one talks about. The hours before a storm that may or may not come.
I make tea. I answer emails. I fold laundry. These small acts feel absurd and sacred at the same time. I’m hyper-aware of the ticking clock, yet nothing urgent is actually happening. It’s a kind of performance – playing the role of someone living a normal day while inside I’m scanning for signs, for symptoms, for shifts. There are no rituals for this. No books, no frameworks, no cards, no language from others to help you mark what you’re going through. Because nothing has happened. But inside, everything is happening. My body knows it. My heart knows it. Every sound is too sharp, every silence too loud. When the phone rings, my breath catches. When it’s quiet, I imagine the worst. I’m constantly calibrating for disaster.
Anxiety has changed form. It’s not a sudden spike anymore. It’s a slow, constant murmur under my skin. My chest tightens when I least expect it. My jaw aches from clenching. My fingers go cold. I walk around the block, not for exercise, but to keep from coming undone. Sometimes I count my steps. Sometimes I pray without knowing who I’m praying to.
And still, I want to fight. I want to do something. I want to fix what I can’t fix. I want to be the one who stands between them and whatever is coming. But there’s no enemy here. No attack. No event. Just a slow drift toward something I can’t stop. I want to scream at the universe: Give me a shape I can punch. Give me a battle I can lose. Anything but this stasis.
People say, “Just be present.” But presence isn’t peace. It’s proximity to pain. I sit in rooms I can’t leave. I stay silent when I want to ask a thousand questions. Presence is a discipline. It’s staying when your instincts say run. David Kessler talks about anticipatory grief – the mourning that happens before a loss , the kind that arrives before the loss, creeping into your lungs, your routines, your conversations. He says, “Each person’s grief is as unique as their fingerprint.” He says grief is personal, that each version is as unique as a fingerprint. But this? Somedays this feels like a fingerprint pressed on a broken glass in raging fire. Other days it feels more like a weather system. It moves through the rooms of my life. It fogs the windows. It slows my speech.
He also wrote: “You don’t have to move on from grief, but you can move forward with it.” Maybe. But forward feels like betrayal. Even imagining a future feels like inviting the end. So I do the only thing that I can, stay in this in-between. It’s narrow and airless, but it’s still in the present.
Joan Didion said grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. But what about the hallway that leads there? That’s where I live now.
Pema Chödrön said, “Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.” I keep circling back to that line
. Because I am closer now. I’m close enough to hear the breath changes. To see what remains unsaid. The quiet hand on my shoulder that stays. Love in this phase becomes microscopic. Every glance, every smile, every ordinary moment carries weight.
There is no map. No structure. No closure. I am not writing from the other side of anything. I’m just here, inside it. There are no lessons in this, only witness.
Most days, I get through by thinking small: ten minutes. Then ten more. I pretend the clock is my companion, not my judge. Some nights, I lie awake and listen for proof of life. Some mornings, I cry in the shower and dry off before anyone notices. None of this is graceful. It’s just real.
Sometimes I wonder if this kind of grief will ever be named. If it’ll have its own rituals. If we’ll learn to find a way to contain for the grief that comes before. Because it deserves space. It deserves to be witnessed.
I don’t know how this ends. I only know that I’m still here. Still loving. Still afraid. Still holding on.
And if you are too – if you’re living in this sharp, shapeless ache – then I hope this meets you where you are. You’re not alone. This is love in its rawest form.
Not the kind that fixes. The kind that stays.