Grief Doesn’t Follow a Schedule

Let Aisle Seven, Be Aisle Seven

I was in a grocery store when it hit me.

Aisle seven. A brand of cereal Maddie liked when she was small.

I stood there for probably two minutes. People walked around me. I couldn’t explain it to anyone in that store. I couldn’t explain it to myself.

That’s the thing about grief that nobody warns you about. It doesn’t announce itself ahead of time.

It arrives in aisle seven. In a song on the radio. In the specific angle of afternoon light in October. In a laugh that sounds like hers.

Eleven years in and it still does this.

What has changed isn’t that it comes less often. It’s that I have stopped being surprised by it. I have stopped fighting it or apologizing for it or trying to shorten it because it is inconvenient or because I am supposed to be past it by now.

I just let aisle seven be aisle seven.

I’m writing this on a day when I am also saying goodbye to my mom.

I won’t try to tell her whole story here. That is not what today is for, and she deserves more care than a paragraph squeezed into a post about something else. What I will say is this. Grief does not organize itself neatly even when you wish it would. You don’t get to grieve one person at a time. You don’t get a day that belongs to only one loss. Today I am thinking about Maddie and my mom in the same breath, and I’m learning that this isn’t a contradiction. It’s just what loving more than one person who is gone looks like.

If you have ever stood in a grocery store, or sat in a parked car, or gone quiet at a family dinner because something pulled you somewhere you didn’t choose to go, you already understand this without me explaining it further.

Here’s what I want you to know if you’re earlier in this than I am.

The ambush doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It doesn’t mean you are handling it badly, or that you should be further along by now, or that you need to explain yourself to the people walking past you in aisle seven.

It means you loved someone enough that their absence still has weight. That weight doesn’t move on your schedule. It moves on its own, and the work isn’t eliminating it. The work is learning to let it move through you without believing it means you’re broken.

Eleven years hasn’t taught me how to stop the ambush. It’s taught me how to stand inside it without flinching as hard as I used to.

I let aisle seven be aisle seven.

Some days, like today, there’s more than one aisle seven waiting. I’m learning to let that be true too.