Turning Back the Page
When present grief reopens what was never fully felt
I’ve been thinking a lot about grief lately.
Not just the obvious kind,
the kind you expect when something hard is happening,
but the kind that seems to arrive from nowhere.
Or at least from somewhere older than the present moment.
I think we often assume grief belongs neatly to one thing.
One loss.
One moment.
One chapter.
But that hasn’t been my experience.
What I’m noticing is that some grief doesn’t get processed when it happens.
It gets stored.
Quietly.
Out of necessity, maybe.
Because we didn’t have the space,
or the safety,
or the words for it at the time.
And it doesn’t disappear.
It waits.
Then something in the present, real and painful in its own right, comes along and touches it.
And suddenly it’s not just about now.
It’s about then as well.
Layers of feeling rising together,
tangled, disproportionate,
and hard to make sense of.
I’m finding that in this season with my mum’s health declining.
I expected sadness.
I didn’t quite expect the way it would open up other things.
Older things.
Feelings I thought I’d already dealt with,
or at least packed away neatly enough to live alongside.
It doesn’t feel like opening a new door.
It feels more like turning back a page in a book I thought was already finished.
A chapter I’d closed carefully,
believing I’d dealt with it.
Only now, as I sit with it again, I can see the gaps.
The places where I kept going because I had to.
The lines I didn’t have words for at the time.
And so I’m here again, pen in hand, almost.
Not rewriting what happened,
but allowing myself to add what was missing.
The feeling.
The weight.
The truth that didn’t have space to land before.
And I don’t always know how to be in that.
There’s a temptation to try and tidy it up.
To tell myself a better story.
To keep perspective.
To not overreact.
To stay strong.
All the things we learn, consciously or not,
about how to handle difficult emotions.
But I’m starting to wonder whether that’s exactly how some of this grief stayed unprocessed in the first place.
Because it didn’t have anywhere to go.
No space to land.
No permission to be fully felt.
No language.
And so it stayed.
What I’m slowly learning, again really,
is the importance of something that feels both very simple
and strangely hard.
Letting it be named.
Saying, even quietly,
this hurts.
Not explaining it away.
Not comparing it.
Not rushing to the part where it makes sense
or feels okay again.
Just staying with it long enough
for it to feel real.
I think this is what lament is, at least in part.
Not a dramatic or overly religious thing.
Just a kind of honest staying.
A way of telling the truth
about how it actually feels,
without needing to fix it straight away.
Because when grief is given some space,
spoken, written, even just acknowledged,
it seems to shift.
Not disappear.
Not resolve neatly.
But it moves, somehow,
loosening its grip just enough
to create a little more room to breathe.
Whereas the grief that isn’t felt
doesn’t go anywhere.
It leaks out sideways.
Or sits quietly under the surface.
Or waits for a moment like this
to rise again.
I’m realising I’m not just grieving what’s in front of me right now.
I’m grieving things that didn’t get a voice at the time.
Things I needed and didn’t have.
Moments that passed
without being held
in the way they should have been.
And that’s a strange thing to sit with.
Because it can feel like too much.
Or like I’m getting it wrong somehow.
But maybe it’s not wrong.
Maybe it’s just what happens
when something in us finally feels safe enough,
or is forced enough,
to feel what it couldn’t before.
So I’m trying, gently, to stay with it.
Not perfectly.
Not all the time.
But a little more than I might have done before.
To not rush myself out of it.
To let the feelings
have some kind of place to go.
I’ve spent some time thinking
I should be above this somehow.
More certain.
Less shaken.
But I’m beginning to see
that bringing all of this,
questions, distress,
even the parts that don’t sound very faith-filled,
might actually be
the most honest expression of faith
I have right now.
Not neat.
Not resolved.
But still turned towards my Father God.
And somewhere in that,
not at the end of it,
not as a neat conclusion,
but within it,
I find myself coming back
to a quiet sense of being held.
Not because everything feels resolved.
It doesn’t.
But because when I stop trying to move away from what’s true,
I don’t seem to be there on my own.