mechanism

Grief is what love does when its object is gone. Nothing here is a malfunction: the mind keeps reaching for someone who is no longer there, and each reach that finds nothing registers as pain. It comes in waves rather than a line, and the waves get further apart rather than smaller — that is what recovery actually looks like.

not to confuse with

sad in general: no specific irreversible loss · lonely: connection is missing but available · hurt: the person is here and their act landed · regret: the pain is about your choice, not about the loss itself

in the body

a physical weight in the chest, tiredness that sleep does not fix, sudden waves at ordinary triggers — a song, a street, a smell

feel it

There is nothing to fix here, and that is the whole instruction. Let the wave come, let it pass. Trying to be over it faster is the one thing that reliably makes it longer.

what to do

Give it room and keep it: talk about them, keep something of theirs, mark the dates. Grief that is allowed becomes memory; grief that is suppressed becomes background flatness that nothing else can lift.

don't

no timeline — «should be over it by now» is imported from people who were not there · do not clear everything out in the first weeks · do not decide big things while the waves are close together

if you do nothing

The waves keep coming and you get better at bracing for them. Bracing costs energy constantly, flattens everything else, and turns a person you loved into a subject you cannot approach.

after

the wave that comes on an ordinary day is normal, not a relapse · what helped once will help again: grief has few tools and they repeat

your track

4 episodes · median 8 → 6 · waves cluster around: evenings · best tool: talk about them ✓2

keys

0–9 set the scale · enter = next step · d = tool done · esc = close dialogs

+ add your own · open in Library: practices →