Grief: A Love That Remains

My first encounter with deep grief came when I was twenty-two years old. My brother Feisal was seventeen. And then he was gone.

I have been wrestling with grief ever since — not just my own, but the grief of the people I love and the people I sit with in my practice. Wanting to understand it. Wanting to know how to move through it without being swallowed by it. How to cope, survive, and eventually — though the word always feels fragile — to thrive, even while carrying the tremendous weight of missing someone who should still be here.

It took me five years. Five years of mourning, and of learning to live with the guilt of being the one who remained. Of trying to make sense of something that insisted on being senseless. Of groping in the dark for a way to quiet my fear — not just for him, for what lay before him as he faced our Creator, but for myself, for my own eventual reckoning with the same door. So many things in the air at once. I did not know where to begin. Most days, I simply began with getting out of bed.

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I watched my father grieve. There is something particular and devastating about watching a parent lose a child — the grief moves against the natural order of things, and the body seems to know it. Feisal had been a gentle, tender, thoughtful young man, and my father had loved him with the quiet depth that some fathers reserve for the children who mirror something precious back at them.

I think of them together now in small images, the way memory insists on the ordinary: renting videos on weekend nights, sitting side by side on the couch with a game controller between them, driving together to run errands with the radio on. They did not need to say much. The company was the thing. And when Feisal left, something in my father shifted — almost imperceptibly, but I saw it. If he had once feared dying, there was now a part of him that looked forward, quietly, to the reunion.

My mother grieved the way mothers do. Deeply. Completely. Without reservation or containment. She could not say his name — cannot say it still — without a sound rising in her that she has to clamp her jaw shut against, teeth gritted, as though the grief, if given even a millimetre of opening, would take the whole of her with it. I have learned, over the years, to be careful around his name in her presence. Not because she has forgotten him. Because she has never, for a single day, stopped loving him.

And then there is our stepmother. I find I do not have adequate words for what she has carried. She lost Feisal, and she lost her own only son, Arief — a double bereavement that I cannot fully imagine inhabiting. Some grief is simply too large for language to hold without breaking. What I can say is that she has endured it. Continues to endure it. And I have enormous respect for a person who keeps standing in the face of that.

Grief is very often lonely. No matter how surrounded you are, at the heart of it is a journey you must traverse alone — with yourself, your regrets, and the love that has no longer anywhere to go.

This is what I have come to understand, through my own loss and through the losses I have been privileged to witness: grief is very often lonely. Not because the people around you do not love you, or are not trying. But because at the centre of grief is an experience so interior, so specific to the relationship you had and the person you lost, that no one — however tender, however present — can fully enter it with you. You will have many conversations with yourself in the dark. You will sit with regrets that feel unspeakable. You will have to learn, slowly and imperfectly, to forgive — yourself, the circumstances, sometimes even the person who left.

And most of all — and this is the part that took me the longest to learn — you will have to learn to honour the pain of your missing. Because that longing, that ache, that specific weight of someone’s absence, is not a sign that something has gone wrong with your grieving. It is a testament to the depth of a love that did not end when they did. It is love, still present, with no person left to land on.

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I no longer believe we get over grief. I am not sure the expression ever made sense to me — as though loss were a puddle you could step across and leave dry on the other side. What I believe now, and what I have seen in my clients and in my own life, is something quieter and more honest than that: we make space for it. We build our lives around it, the way a river builds around a stone — not removing the stone, but finding a way to flow that accounts for its presence.

We learn to move forward and live fully — and fully is the important word, because a half-life in honour of the dead is not what they would have wanted for us. We learn that joy is not a betrayal. We learn that the capacity to love again, to laugh again, to be present again in our own lives, is not a sign that we loved them less. It is a sign that we loved them enough to carry them forward.

Feisal has been gone for a long time now. I still miss him. I miss the man he would have become. I miss him at the table and in the conversation and on the ordinary Tuesday afternoons when nothing particular is happening and his absence is somehow loudest. But he lives on — in us, in the way we love each other, in the qualities he had that we try to carry forward. A gentle, tender, thoughtful young man. He still is.

That is what grief, at its most healed, looks like. Not the absence of pain. The presence of love — continuing.

— Nina
Psychotherapist  ·  Workplace Wellbeing Consultant  ·  Kopi with Nina