when people stop asking
In April, people asked less.
Not because they didn’t care. Because time had passed and grief has an expiry date for everyone except the person carrying it.
The world had decided I was coping.
I was back in routines. Bedtimes. Evenings. The quiet stretch at the end of the day where everything I’d held off finally showed up. I didn’t talk about it much. I didn’t want to explain that nothing had resolved just because weeks had moved on.
April felt like being left alone with it.
Not abandoned. Just… unaccompanied.
I noticed how often my mum came to mind in ordinary moments. Things I would have told her once. Things she wouldn’t have known how to hold anyway. The absence was loud in small ways.
I kept expecting something to give. For the weight to shift. For grief to become something I could name more cleanly.
It didn’t.
It just sat there. Less sharp than February. Less frantic than January. But heavier somehow, because it no longer came with instructions.
There was no list.
No ceremony.
No reason to take a day off.
Just the ongoingness of it.
I remember thinking: this must be what people mean when they say grief is lonely. Not the tears. The quiet. The way life resumes and you’re expected to slot back into it without disrupting the shape of things.
I did. Mostly.
But April is where I learned that holding it together isn’t a phase you pass through. Sometimes it’s a way of living for a while.
And no one tells you when it ends.
