There's a particular kind of silence that follows grief, and it's not the silence of an empty house or an unanswered phone call. It's a quieter, more unsettling kind — the silence of waiting for a sign that never comes.
I hear about this silence often.
Someone will sit across from me and describe watching a close friend find comfort in a butterfly that landed on her windowsill the week after her father died, or a father who swears his son sends him songs on the radio at exactly the right moment. They tell me these stories with a kind of longing, and then they ask the question that's really been sitting underneath the whole conversation.
"Why hasn't that happened to me?"
I want to say something to anyone who has ever asked themselves that question in the quiet of their own mind: feeling nothing does not mean you were loved any less, and it does not mean the person you lost has drifted somewhere out of reach.
Grief doesn't hand out its comfort evenly.
Some people are wired to notice a symbolic bird outside a window and feel instantly held by it. Others could stand in a garden full of the exact flower their mother loved and feel nothing but the ordinary presence of a flower. Neither response says anything about how deeply someone loved, or how deeply they were loved in return. It says something about how that particular mind processes meaning, symbolism, and comfort-nothing more.
I once worked with a woman who had lost her sister very suddenly. She had spent months hoping for a dream, a smell, a song, anything that might feel like a message. Nothing came. She told me she had started to wonder if her sister was disappointed in her somehow, as though the absence of a sign was itself a kind of verdict.
We talked for a long while, and near the end of our conversation, I asked her to tell me what she and her sister used to do together on ordinary Tuesday afternoons. She laughed before she even answered, and told me they used to sit on the phone doing absolutely nothing, sometimes not even talking, just existing in the same call while they each did chores around their own homes.
"That's not a memory people usually think to share," I told her. "But it might be the most honest one you have."
She hadn't been waiting for a sign at all, not really. She had been waiting for the specific, particular comfort of simply being near her sister without needing anything dramatic to happen. And in a strange way, once she understood that, she stopped needing a sign to feel connected to her. The connection had never actually left. It had just been overshadowed by the search for something more cinematic.
If you've been waiting for something that hasn't arrived, please don't turn that waiting into evidence against yourself or against your loved one. Grief is not a test with a scoring system. Some relationships continue to be felt in dramatic, unmistakable ways. Others continue in the quiet habits, the remembered phrases, the recipes still being made the same way they always were.
Both are real.
Both are enough.
If a sign eventually comes, I hope it brings you peace. And if it doesn't, I hope you can trust that the absence of a sign was never a measurement of love-yours or theirs.
If this resonates, you can learn more about working with me or book a reading at https://www.aperfectsoul.com
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