Dear journal,
Twice now, I have found myself doing something utterly ordinary, casual shopping, and becoming unexpectedly overwhelmed. There is something almost embarrassing about it. I am not at my grandmother’s house. I am not sorting boxes or deciding what stays and what goes. I am simply walking the aisles of Walmart or King Cash Saver, places I have walked hundreds of times before, often at her side. And yet, it is there that grief catches me most fully off guard.
At my grandmother’s house, I have grown, if not comfortable, then at least acclimated. The house I knew no longer exists. Everything is boxed. The rooms are hollowed of their former gravity. Even my role there has shifted from grandson to executor, from presence to process. The space announces loss so clearly that my emotional response feels almost procedural. I arrive prepared. I know what I am walking into. The grief has edges, and those edges are familiar.
The grocery store is different.
These are not places of memory in the way we usually understand them. They are places of repetition, habit, and continuity. I did not go there to remember my grandmother; I went there to live alongside her. These were shared routines, not commemorations. The aisles carry no markers of loss, no signal that anything has changed. And yet, they are saturated with a quieter kind of memory. They are filled with the memory of life simply unfolding as it was supposed to.
When grief appears in these spaces, it feels disorienting because it violates expectation. There is no reason to be sad in the frozen breakfast aisle. No obvious trigger. And yet the body knows before the mind does. The familiar suddenly becomes unstable. The present fractures just enough to reveal what is no longer there. I am not mourning her house in those moments; I am mourning the version of myself who once moved through the world without this absence.
This, I think, is one of the subtler markers of growing older. Loss no longer confines itself to designated spaces. It seeps into the ordinary. The world remains recognizably the same, but it is no longer populated in the same way. The paths are intact; the companions are not. Grief, at this stage, is less about the acute pain I felt when my Grandpa died and more about reorientation. More about learning how to inhabit a life whose familiar coordinates have shifted.
Standing at the edge of a new year intensifies this awareness. The cultural language of renewal and forward motion sits uneasily beside the reality of loss. I am not stepping into the new year lighter or resolved. I am stepping into it changed. Shakespeare's “undiscovered country” feels apt not because it suggests adventure, but because it acknowledges uncertainty. This is a life not yet mapped, one in which grief is no longer a singular event but a condition I carry with me into spaces that once felt neutral.
I am not trying to make sense of this in any final way. I am not extracting a lesson or shaping it into meaning. For now, the work is simply to notice. The work is to pause in the aisle, to recognize the wave as it comes, and to let it pass without demanding that it justify itself. Sitting with grief like this is not indulgence or stagnation. It is an honest reckoning with the fact that love, even a complicated love, does not disappear when its object does. It relocates. It surfaces where life continues.
Walking into this new year, then, is not an act of leaving behind. It is an act of carrying forward. Forward into ordinary places, into familiar routines, into a future that remains, for now, undiscovered.
Always,
Dave