Shoving the stapler across the mahogany desk was the only thing that felt real in a room that smelled aggressively of artificial lavender and suppressed panic. I watched it slide, a heavy, metal weight crossing the 3 inches of clear space between my hand and the edge. It didn’t fall. It just sat there, waiting for the laws of physics to catch up with my internal chaos. I am a grief counselor, which means I am professionally mandated to have it together, yet three hours ago I was sobbing into a bowl of cereal because a commercial for a life insurance company featured a man teaching his daughter how to ride a bike in a specific shade of golden-hour light. The lighting was 63 percent too effective. It was a manipulative, beautiful lie, and it broke me.

The Illusion of the Staircase

People hate that. They want the 5 stages. They want the $243 workbook with the perforated edges so they can tear out their progress and file it away. But grief isn’t a staircase; it’s a renovation of the entire building while you’re still living in it. You think you’re fixing the roof, and then you realize the foundation has shifted 13 degrees to the left, and nothing will ever be level again. You don’t get ‘over’ it. You just get used to the slant.

I made the mistake once-back when I was 33 and full of academic arrogance-of telling a woman that her pain would eventually ‘soften’ into a manageable hum. She looked at me with a cold, terrifying clarity and told me that her pain was the only thing she had left of her son. To soften it was to erase him. I felt like a fraud then, and honestly, the feeling hasn’t entirely left the building.

The Digital Afterlife

We are obsessed with the idea of ‘moving on.’ It’s a predatory concept, really. It implies that the baggage we carry is a choice, an optional weight we can just set down at a rest stop. It ignores the fact that the weight is actually a new limb. You don’t move on from an arm. You learn how to carry the world with the strength you have left. In the digital age, this becomes even more grotesque. We have these persistent digital echoes-the 43 unread emails in a deceased father’s inbox, the social media profile that keeps suggesting you ‘celebrate’ the birthday of a ghost. We are surrounded by a bureaucracy of existence that doesn’t know how to handle an ending. There is a specific kind of cold, clinical trail involved in the aftermath, the 93 different administrative hurdles you have to jump over just to prove someone is gone.

The Unprotocolled Tuesday

I remember a specific afternoon when I tried to explain this to a group of trainee therapists. I told them that their job wasn’t to fix the broken. Their job was to be the person who wasn’t afraid of the mess. Most of them looked at me as if I’d just suggested we all stop washing our hands. They wanted tools. They wanted 3-step protocols and diagnostic criteria. But you can’t protocol a Tuesday night when the silence in the kitchen is so loud it makes your teeth ache. You can’t diagnose the way a specific brand of mustard can trigger a three-day depressive episode because it was the only brand he would eat. We are so afraid of the raw, unpolished reality of sadness that we’ve sanitized it into ‘wellness.’

The Unpolished Reality

I find myself digressing into the memory of my own grandmother’s house. She had this one room, the ‘good’ room, where everything was covered in plastic. It was pristine. It was perfect. And it was completely dead. No one ever sat there. No one ever laughed there. That’s what we try to do with our lives after a loss. We try to wrap our hearts in plastic so they won’t get stained. But the stains are the point. The stains are the map of where we’ve been. I spent 53 minutes yesterday looking at a coffee stain on my rug that looks vaguely like a map of Italy, thinking about how I should have cleaned it months ago. But it happened the night my sister called to tell me the news, and now, for some reason, scrubbing it feels like a betrayal of that phone call. It’s illogical. It’s a mess. It’s exactly how life works.

I’ve told Mr. Aris 3 times now that he doesn’t have to forgive himself for being angry. He looks at me with those 103-stone knuckles and asks me when the anger will end. I don’t tell him the truth: that the anger just eventually gets tired and turns into a very quiet, very heavy sadness that sits in the corner of the room like a loyal dog. It doesn’t leave. It just stops barking.

The Cost of Feeling

The commercial I saw this morning-the one that made me cry into my cornflakes-it wasn’t even that good. It was for car insurance. But the music had this 3-chord progression that felt like a hand reaching into my chest. It reminded me that we are all just walking around with these exposed nerves, waiting for something to brush against them. And we spend so much energy trying to build armor. We use work, we use ‘self-care,’ we use 73 different types of distractions to keep from feeling the vibration of the world. But the vibration is where the life is. If you don’t feel the grief, you can’t feel the 3 seconds of pure joy when the sun hits the sidewalk at just the right angle in October.

The Acceptance of Imperfection

The Cost of Love is the Willingness to be Haunted.

Recovery vs. Becoming

I often think about the word ‘recovery.’ It implies a return to a previous state. If you break your leg, you recover. The bone knits back together, perhaps a bit thicker at the break point, but it’s the same leg. Grief doesn’t work that way. There is no ‘previous state’ to return to. The person you were before the loss is gone as surely as the person you lost. You are a 3rd version of yourself now. This version is perhaps a bit more fragile, perhaps a bit more cynical, but infinitely deeper. We should stop asking people when they’ll be back to their ‘old selves.’ That person is a ghost. We should start asking them who they are becoming now.

Mr. Aris finally un-clutched his hands. He took a breath that sounded like 23 years of held tension finally escaping. He didn’t say anything profound. He didn’t have a breakthrough that would fit into a 3-minute segment on a morning talk show. He just looked at the stapler on my desk and said, ‘That’s a very sturdy stapler.’ And in that moment, I knew he was going to be okay. Not ‘fixed.’ Not ‘cured.’ But okay. He was noticing the world again. He was acknowledging the 3-dimensional reality of an object that had no emotional weight. It was a start. It was a 13-percent shift in the atmosphere of the room.

Staying Open to the Draft

We need to allow ourselves the grace of being unfinished. We are all works in progress, held together by 43 separate threads of memory and hope, some of which are frayed beyond repair. And that’s fine. The beauty isn’t in the wholeness; it’s in the way the light filters through the cracks. I went home after my session with Mr. Aris and watched that insurance commercial again. I didn’t cry this time. I just sat there and let the 3-chord progression wash over me, acknowledging the fact that I am a messy, contradictory human being who works with other messy, contradictory human being. I looked at the coffee stain on my rug and decided it could stay for another 3 months. It’s not a stain; it’s a landmark. And sometimes, the most radical thing you can do in a world that demands closure is to simply stay open, even when the draft is cold.