Grief is heavy.
Not simply sad. Heavy.
It settles into the body with a kind of insistence. In the shoulders. Behind the eyes. In limbs that feel tired before the day has properly begun.
And with the weight comes a strange indifference.
Things that would normally matter suddenly do not. Plans feel unnecessary. Conversations require effort. Food is nothing interesting. Television is noise. Messages sit unanswered. Even things once enjoyed can feel oddly distant, as though they belong to another version of life.
The world continues to offer itself, but grief dulls the appetite for it.
Perhaps this is one of the least spoken-about parts of loss. Not the tears, but the absence of wanting. The difficulty of caring about ordinary things when something extraordinary has been taken away.
We like to imagine grief as emotion, but grief is also depletion.
It is the energy required simply to carry absence. And perhaps that is why it has weight. Because love once had somewhere to go. Into conversations, routines, meals, phone calls, questions, small acts of care.
Then suddenly it does not.
Christian faith does not make that lighter. Even resurrection does not erase the wounds. Perhaps faith simply gives us permission to remain for a while in the heaviness, without pretending to be interested, hopeful or restored before we are.
Some losses do not immediately teach us anything. They simply make the world feel heavier.
And for a time, that may be enough.
