It will take a couple of months, be patient with yourself.

It’s been a couple of months, get yourself together and move on!

If you ever lost a loved one, you would have heard the two statements above at least once. And we do want to believe that time will heal our grief, and we will move on. But often that doesn’t happen. Even after months, we still don’t feel like we are ‘moving on’ from our grief. So what does moving on from grief even mean? Is moving on getting back to life as usual? Feeling happy again? Not miss the lost person anymore?

Perhaps moving on is hard because sometimes we don’t even know what moving on is. I feel that grief of losing a loved one never goes away. The pain of loss always stays with us, no matter what. Even after years and decades of loss you would still very likely wish that it didn’t happen.

So trying to get over the grief of loss is like setting a very hard goal for self. I feel grief that I have is a part of me. It’s personal, it’s mine, and it will always stay in my heart. Whenever I look at it, it gives me pain. A reasonable moving-on goal then is to reach a state where it gives me peace too, besides the pain. I get peace from the time we got to spent together, peace from the memories I have. At the time of loss the grief fills my full heart, but as I move on, I put it in a compartment of my heart and live my present life with the rest of my heart. Even after moving on, I can go to that compartment in my heart at any time, even after decades, it holds the world that once was real for me.

This is how I feel, how about you?