When Grief Becomes the Professor

Grief is one of those things you think you understand until it hits your doorstep. It changes how you breathe, how you move, how you see the world. The day it arrived in my life, everything I thought I knew about strength and faith got tested.

I thought grief would be something I worked through, like a project with an ending. But it’s not like that. Grief moves in waves. It shows up when you least expect it like in songs, smells, or quiet mornings. It’s sneaky like that. It teaches patience in the hardest way.

For a while, I tried to outrun it. I kept busy. Smiled when I needed to. Told myself I was fine. But grief will wait on you. It will sit in the corners of your life until you stop pretending. And when you finally sit with it, you realize it’s not just sadness. It’s love with nowhere to go.

I learned to stop fighting the pain and start listening to what it was trying to teach me. It taught me that love doesn’t end just because life does. It taught me that missing someone doesn’t mean you’re stuck — it means you loved deeply enough to still feel the echo. It taught me that crying doesn’t make you weak. It’s just how the body releases what the heart can’t hold.

There were days I felt like I’d never find joy again. But grief also showed me beauty in small things. A memory that makes me laugh instead of cry. A breeze that feels like a hug from someone gone. That’s when I started to understand that grief isn’t something to get over. It’s something to grow through.

Losing someone you love breaks you open. But that openness makes room for compassion you didn’t have before. It changes the way you love people, the way you forgive, the way you move through this world. You start seeing time differently. You stop wasting energy on things that don’t matter because you’ve seen how fragile everything really is.

I used to pray for the day it wouldn’t hurt anymore. Now I just pray for the strength to carry it with grace because baby, that grief doesn’t go away. It becomes part of your story, part of your wisdom, part of your empathy. It becomes a professor.