The Moment I Realized Grief Had Changed How I See Time

I was scrolling through old photos one afternoon, the kind of mindless scrolling you do when you're waiting for coffee to brew, when I stopped on a picture from years ago. Before I even registered what I was looking at, a thought had already formed in my mind. Was this before, or after?

I didn't choose to ask that question. It simply arrived, the way certain habits arrive without our permission. And in that small pause, standing in my kitchen with my phone in one hand, I realized something had shifted in me that I hadn't fully noticed until right then. My son's death had become a line running straight through the middle of my life, and everything I remembered now got sorted onto one side of it or the other.

I don't think that's unusual. I've heard the same thing from so many people I've sat with over the years. A woman once told me she still catches herself thinking "that was three summers before" or "that happened the year after," without ever finishing the sentence with what actually marked that dividing line. She didn't need to say it out loud. We both already knew.

Grief has a strange relationship with time. In the beginning, it can feel like time has stopped completely, like the world outside your door is still spinning while you're standing perfectly still. Later, time starts moving again, but it doesn't move the same way it used to. Anniversaries land differently. Holidays carry weight they never carried before. And somewhere in the middle of all that, our minds quietly build a new calendar, one with only two seasons: before, and after.

At first I found that unsettling. It felt like proof of how much my life had been rearranged by something I never asked for. But the longer I've sat with it, the more I've come to see it differently. That dividing line isn't really about loss. It's about how deeply someone mattered. We don't build a new sense of time around people who barely touched our lives. We build it around the ones who shaped nearly everything.

So when I catch myself doing that math without meaning to, before him or after him, I've stopped treating it as something to fix. It's simply part of how my heart keeps him close. It's one more quiet way love continues showing up, long after the life we shared together changed shape.

If you've noticed the same thing happening in your own mind, I hope this offers a little reassurance. You're not stuck, and you're not doing grief wrong. You're just carrying someone who mattered enough to reorganize the way you experience your own life. That's not something to apologize for.

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Continue Reading? If this resonated with you, you might also like Is It Normal to Feel Closer to Spirit After a Loss?, where I talk about why grief often opens the door to experiences we never expected.

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