I love this analogy of grief as the ocean. The ebbs and flows are relentless and unpredictable. The hardest part is learning to navigate the turbulence. When we’re facing loss, we often look back on how we’ve grieved in the past — and while that instinct is natural, it can be misleading. No two relationships are the same, and so no two experiences of grief are either. Trying to apply the same map to a different journey rarely works.

Grief and fear often feel similar. One of the things we fear most is death — our own and that of our loved ones. But beyond that, we respond to fear in ways that echo our responses to grief. In myself, I’ve seen this pattern: denial, the bargaining — If only this hadn’t happened, If only I’d done something differently. But death is not something we can undo. And grief, like fear, doesn’t vanish overnight. It takes time. There’s no minimum, no maximum. Just the process.