There is something incredibly strange about going back to a familiar place after someone you love passes. Everything can look almost exactly the same, but somehow nothing feels the same. The roads are still there. The same stores are open. People are still driving to work, grabbing coffee, walking their dogs, complaining about traffic, and living completely normal lives.
The house is still standing exactly where it was before. From the outside, you could almost convince yourself that nothing has changed. But then you walk through the door and realize that everything has.
I’ve unfortunately experienced this feeling more than once in my life. I lost both of my parents when I was young, so grief entered my story long before I really understood what grief was. When you’re a kid and something that enormous happens, you don’t necessarily have the words to explain how it changes you. You just know there was a life before it happened and a life afterward. You learn much earlier than you should that the world has a strange ability to keep moving even when your own world has completely stopped…
I had to go back home after both funerals. To my childhood house where my parents would walk the halls, but now only memories fill those walls.
Now, twenty years later, I’m experiencing another version of that feeling after losing my grandfather this summer. This week I’m staying at my grandmother’s house in Conway, a place that is familiar to me and filled with memories. I’ve been here plenty of times. I know the house. I know the town. I know the roads. But being here now feels completely different because someone who was always part of this place isn’t here anymore.
I was nervous about coming here this week because I knew it would probably bring up emotions I couldn’t predict. Grief is funny that way. Sometimes you can prepare yourself for the big things, but it’s usually something completely ordinary that gets you. It’s looking toward the place where someone normally sat. It’s walking into a room and remembering them being there. It’s hearing a noise and, for half a second, forgetting that they’re gone. It’s noticing something they used every day or remembering a random conversation that meant absolutely nothing at the time but suddenly feels incredibly important.
The house hasn’t really changed. I have.
That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot while I’ve been here. Places carry memories, but we also bring our current selves into those places. I’m not the same person who walked through these rooms before my grandfather died. Just like I wasn’t the same little girl after losing my parents. Loss changes the way you see the world, and sometimes returning to a familiar place makes you realize just how much you’ve changed.
You would think that experiencing major loss before would somehow prepare you for experiencing it again. I used to think that maybe because I had survived losing my parents, I would understand grief better if it ever came back into my life in another enormous way. But that’s not really how grief works. Every person occupies a completely different place in your heart. Losing one person doesn’t train you to lose another. There isn’t some grief certification you earn where eventually you know exactly what to do.
Losing my grandfather didn’t feel like losing my parents all over again. It created its own kind of emptiness. Every relationship has its own memories, routines, language, safety, frustrations, laughter, and love. When someone dies, you’re not simply losing “a person.” You’re losing the particular version of your life that existed with them in it.
One of the biggest things I’m learning is how important it is not to let someone’s ending erase their middle. When someone dies, especially when their final days are difficult, those last memories can become incredibly loud. We remember the hospital. We remember the phone calls. We remember the fear and uncertainty. We remember the moment we realized things weren’t going to turn out the way we desperately wanted them to. We remember the goodbye.
Those memories matter, but they aren’t the whole story.
My grandfather had an entire life before his final days. My parents had entire lives before the day I lost them. There were holidays, ordinary afternoons, family dinners, car rides, jokes, arguments, celebrations, annoying habits, random conversations and thousands of moments that nobody realized they should be memorizing while they were happening. Sometimes I think the ordinary memories become the most precious because they’re the ones we assumed we’d always have more of.
I don’t want the way someone left this world to become the loudest thing I remember about the way they existed in it.
Maybe that’s part of healing.
I’ve also realized that I used to have a very different idea of what healing was supposed to look like. I thought eventually you reached some magical point where something stopped hurting. You “moved on.” You were healed. The grief chapter closed and you started the next one. After living with loss for so much of my life, I don’t believe that anymore.
I don’t think we completely heal from losing someone we love. I think we slowly learn how to heal around the space they left behind.
At first, grief can take up almost everything. Then life slowly starts growing around it. You laugh again. You make plans. You fall in love. You make new friends. You celebrate birthdays. You work. You travel. You sit in a coffee shop. You take yourself shopping. You go to dinner alone. You have an unexpectedly good day. Then, sometimes completely out of nowhere, you miss them so badly that it feels brand new again.
That doesn’t mean you’re going backward.
I think that’s something we need to give ourselves more permission to understand. Healing isn’t linear because love isn’t linear. You can have a beautiful morning and cry that afternoon. You can love the life you’re building while simultaneously wishing someone were still here to experience it with you. You can be grateful and heartbroken at exactly the same time.
Being here this week is teaching me that creating new memories in a place filled with old ones doesn’t erase anything. Going out for coffee doesn’t mean I’m avoiding grief. Taking myself to Applebee’s and sitting in the same spot we did, doesn’t mean I don’t miss my grandfather. Laughing at something doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten why being here feels different.
Maybe creating new memories is actually part of how we reclaim places after loss. We don’t have to allow the saddest thing that happened somewhere to become the only thing that place represents. We can slowly add life back into it. We can laugh in rooms where we’ve cried. We can tell funny stories about the people we’ve lost. We can say their names. We can rearrange furniture, celebrate holidays, cook dinner, open the windows, play music and allow life to exist alongside grief.
I’ve realized there’s also a difference between going back and returning. Going back sounds like trying to recreate something that existed before. Returning means showing up as the person you are now.
I can’t go back to the world where my parents are still alive. I can’t go back to the version of this house where my grandfather is still here. I can’t become the version of myself who existed before those losses, either. But I can return. I can walk into familiar places carrying everything that happened and allow myself to experience them differently.
Maybe healing isn’t about getting back to who we were before something broke our hearts. Maybe it’s about discovering who we are afterward.
This week, I’m learning that grief and life don’t have to take turns. They can exist together. I can miss my grandfather and still have a good day. I can carry my parents with me and still keep becoming someone they never got the chance to meet. I can feel the heaviness of a familiar house and still walk outside and experience something new.
Maybe that’s what healing really looks like. Not forgetting. Not moving on. Not pretending it doesn’t hurt. Just continuing.
We carry the people we’ve lost into new houses, new relationships, new birthdays, new adventures and new versions of ourselves. And when we return to the places where they once stood, the emptiness we feel isn’t proof that they’re disappearing from our story.
It’s proof that they were here. It’s proof that they were loved. And maybe the bravest thing we can do with all that love is keep living.
xoxo, alli<3
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