Op-Ed: We Don’t Move On From Grief — We Move Through It

When my wife died, I expected grief. But what I hadn’t anticipated was how disoriented I would feel. Not just emotionally, but existentially. For so long, I had structured my life around her needs—our routines, our conversations, our quiet moments. With her death, I not only lost her, I lost us. I lost who I had become beside her.

And yet, almost immediately, the world began offering me well-intentioned scripts: “It’s time to move on.” “You’ll find a new chapter.” “She’d want you to be happy.”

They meant well. But none of those phrases fit the shape of my experience.

Because I didn’t want to move on. That implies leaving her behind. That somehow, love has an expiration date.

I have come to believe something else entirely: we don’t move on from grief—we move through it.

Grief doesn’t end the day after the funeral, or after the estate is settled, or even after a year has passed. For caregivers, it’s not a moment—it’s a marathon. It begins long before death and continues long after. And it changes you. Not just in how you feel, but in who you are.

I am not the same person I was before those 14 years. I am more tender in some ways, more tired in others. I carry a deeper understanding of vulnerability, and of love. I know what it means to sit beside someone as they fade—and to love them more fiercely for it. That experience reshaped me. And it reshaped what came after.

Yes, I have found joy again. I have built a new life. I have opened myself to love. But not by erasing the past. My new life doesn’t exist despite my wife’s memory—it exists because of it. Because of how she shaped me. Because of what we endured together. Because I carry her with me, in quiet ways, every single day.

Sometimes she is in a smell, a phrase, a flash of sunlight through a window. Sometimes she is in the way I comfort others, or in the music I choose to play. She is not gone—not entirely. She lives in me, not haunting, but holding.

This is the part of grief that our culture struggles to make room for: the long arc. The permanent change. The fact that some losses don’t “heal” the way we expect—they transform. You don’t go back to who you were. You become someone else.

We need a new language for this kind of grief. Especially for those who’ve walked the long, quiet road of caregiving. It’s not about closure. It’s not about moving on. It’s about integration. Taking the love and the loss and making them part of your foundation.

So when someone says, “You’ve recovered so well,” I gently correct them: “I didn’t recover. I was changed.”

And in that change, there is room for newness. There is even room for joy. But not the same joy as before. A different joy—one that knows sorrow. One that honors what came before.

Grief, after all, is not the price of love. It’s the continuation of it.