Grief Finds You on a Thursday Night
By Natalie McCarty
Grief is an odd and unpredictable thing. It arrives unannounced, like a visitor who’s lost track of time, showing up on a quiet Thursday night at 7:58 p.m., without reason or invitation.
Nothing in particular happened today—no anniversary, no familiar scent, no song that transported me back. Just a fleeting thought: the movie I was watching, you probably would have loved it. And suddenly, there it was.
Maybe grief finds us when we’re most off-guard. I had foolishly thought that I had put most of it to rest. But, of course, no one is ever truly free from their grief. Because the hurt and the loss are irreversible. And you just aren’t here anymore.
It’s so much easier for me to talk about the grief of the life I almost had–the what-ifs, the roads not taken, the lack of options I feel I have now. That grief can be meditated on, reframed, turned into a lesson. That grief I am “all the better for.” Even the grief of a breakup is manageable and is often laced with just enough resentment to dull its nagging pain.
But I cannot talk about the deaths I have known. For some reason, I do not know how to do it, even though I’m more familiar with the feeling than any other.
I do not remember life without grief. My earliest memories are laced with it. With the sadness and then with the guilt: the guilt of silence. Is my reluctance to speak of them a betrayal? Am I failing to keep their memory alive?
My cousin, Shane Drisner, was the most vibrant person I had ever known. And as I grow older, I realize just how uniquely similar we were. At this stage in my life, I can’t imagine anyone else who could swim in my brain the way he most likely would be able to. Both of us, ambitious to a fault. I could go on and on about him. There is so much to say, and yet, I cannot say it. It makes me too sad; I cannot stomach the grief. I just miss him too much.
Grief teaches you to compartmentalize. It forces you to separate a part of yourself—the one your loved one knew—and to build a new version of yourself on top of that foundation. And yet, we still carry them, don’t we? In the movies they would have loved, in the ambitions we chase, in the sudden pangs of sorrow that creep in on a random Thursday.
Grief is universal, yet its impact is impossible to generalize and often underestimated. Studies show that 57% of Americans have grieved the loss of someone close to them in the past three years. More strikingly, an estimated six million children in the U.S. will experience the death of a parent or sibling by the time they turn 18. And grief doesn’t just weigh on the heart—it imprints itself on the body. It truly irrevocably changes you in more way than one. Research suggests that bereavement can accelerate biological aging, increasing health risks for those who have lost loved ones. No wonder.
Despite its prevalence, grief remains an uncomfortable subject. The awkward pauses, the well-meaning but hollow condolences, the unspoken expectation to “move on.” But grief doesn’t adhere to a linear timeline. It lingers in the spaces between, in the small, quiet moments that no one else sees. In the sight of a hummingbird. In the smell of rain. In the presence of a white rose. In the changing of a season. It reminds us, over and over again, that love and loss are two sides of the same coin.
It sounds like a contradiction to say you’re making peace with your grief. Because it is. However, it is possible to make peace with its presence. In recognizing that to grieve is, in its own painful way, to love: endlessly, stubbornly, and without end.
