Some grief moves the way it's supposed to. It comes in waves, gets talked through, gets understood, and, over time, loosens its grip enough that life has room in it again. And some grief doesn't. You can talk about it for years, understand exactly what happened and why it hurts, be able to narrate the whole thing clearly to a therapist or a friend, and still find it sitting in you exactly where it was on day one, untouched by all that understanding.

There's a particular kind of sorrow people bring to me that doesn't quite fit their own story. They can't point to the loss that caused it. It doesn't track with anything that's happened in their own life, at least not obviously. It just sits there, familiar and old, as though it's been there longer than they have.