The following reflection was written by Priyanka after participating in the Exposing Grief program. Shared with permission.

The things we love, the things we lose, and the ways those experiences shape who we become.

Before I continue, I want to make something clear. I am by no means making an argument for flattening grief; this is simply an attempt to broaden the ways we think about it.

A parent losing a child. A child losing a parent. A spouse losing a life partner. Human beings living through profound loss.

These experiences are not equivalent in magnitude to every other grief.

Some losses permanently reshape the landscape of a person’s life. Some griefs are so profound that surviving them can feel impossible. They deserve every ounce of compassion, acknowledgement, and reverence we can offer.

What I’m exploring here is not whether all griefs are equal. They are not.

What I’m exploring is whether there are griefs we fail to recognize at all.

When people hear the word “grief,” they often assume the worst. They imagine funerals, tragedy, devastating loss, and heartbreak.

And yes, grief absolutely, predominantly, lives there too. But I find myself wondering whether we’ve made the application of this word far too narrow and isolated for the role it plays in our lives.

Because grief also lives in quieter places, and seems to show up everywhere.

It shows up in friendships that drift apart. In cities that no longer feel like home. In dreams that never come to fruition. In chapters of life that ended before we were ready for them to end. It shows up in watching our parents grow older. It shows up in our own aging, when sometimes we look in the mirror and still see a five-year-old version of ourselves standing there wide-eyed, with an even wider smile and maybe a tooth or two missing. It shows up in realizing that multiple versions of ourselves, and life as we knew it, no longer exist.

It shows up anywhere something mattered.

And yet whenever I bring up grief in conversation, I’ve noticed something strange happens. People become uncomfortable, not knowing what to say or how to show up. They go straight to problem-solving. They become quieter. They assume something worse. They change the topic. Sometimes they disappear from the conversation altogether, as though grief is contagious and might somehow rub off on them if they stay too close for too long.

It always makes me a little sad when that happens. Of course I don’t want people to get sad, nor do I enjoy dwelling on loss. It makes me sad because grief is one of the most universal human experiences we have, and yet we often treat it as something unusual, alarming, or best avoided.

The older I get, the more I find myself wanting to normalize talking about grief. Not just grief after death. Grief in all its forms. Because grief is so much more than most of us allow it to be.

Come to think of it, isn’t grief just another word for acknowledging that something mattered?

You don’t grieve things that never moved you. You don’t grieve things that were meaningless.

Today, I found myself feeling the loss of something that most people probably wouldn’t even think to call grief. The loss of a version of life that once felt full and permanent.

My pet had a best friend. And now that friendship no longer exists in the way it once did because they’re on opposite sides of the world, literally. Nothing catastrophic happened. Yet something meaningful changed.

A bond that once brought joy into both of their lives, and in doing so brought joy into mine, is no longer part of their everyday reality. And somehow, I found myself grieving that too. Not because it’s the same as losing a loved one. Of course it isn’t. But because it mattered. The friendship mattered. The memories mattered. The joy mattered.

That chapter of our lives mattered.

And I think we often underestimate how many of our griefs fall into this category. The losses that don’t come with ceremonies. They don’t receive sympathy cards. The ones that nobody officially acknowledges.

We don’t always know what to do with those griefs. So we often pretend they aren’t grief at all.

Perhaps that’s part of what makes grief so difficult to talk about. The discomfort that comes from the fact that grief refuses to fit neatly into categories or even stay contained. We want it to be reserved for extraordinary circumstances. But grief has a way of appearing wherever love, attachment, meaning, or hope once lived.

Some griefs are socially recognized. Others are invisible. Some happen all at once. Others unfold over years. Some arrive after death. Others arrive after change or absence.

Could it be that the reason why people become uncomfortable when the subject comes up, is because grief forces us to acknowledge something we’d rather forget? That everything changes. That everyone ages. That the people we love will not be here forever. That neither will we. That everything we know and have come to love is, in some way, fleeting and impermanent. And that we have utterly no control over it.

But avoiding grief doesn’t make these realities less true. It only makes us less willing to talk about them and less likely to seek support when we need it.

I recently had a conversation with a friend and realized they are grieving being an orphan as an adult because, regardless of what the relationship was like, both of their parents have passed away.

It’s a grief we don’t talk about enough.

Yes, we talk about losing parents. We talk about funerals. We talk about bereavement. But we rarely talk about what follows.

Because larger griefs are rarely a single rupture point. They are not one event that happens in isolation, gets stitched up, and eventually concludes with a neat happily-ever-after.

They often create countless smaller ruptures that reveal themselves over time. A birthday, a graduation, or a major life milestone arrives. A question comes up that only they could have answered. You reach for the phone and remember. The original loss may have happened years ago, but its echoes continue to show up in ordinary moments of everyday life.

There is a particular loneliness in that reality that deserves to be acknowledged.

At the same time, there are people who grew up as orphans. That grief has a different shape entirely. It grieves an absence that began long before it could be named.

Different experiences. Different losses. Different wounds. Yet both deserve to be grieved.

For years, I unconsciously treated grief as something to overcome. Something to get past.

Something that should eventually disappear if I was healthy enough, healed enough, or strong enough.

I have now begun wondering if we sometimes mistake being human for being broken.

What if grief is not always evidence that something is wrong?

What if it simply means that I cared about something deeply enough for its absence to matter?

Wouldn’t that perspective change how we approach grief?

How would our lives change if we treated grief less like an unwelcome guest and more like a natural consequence of caring deeply?

Not long ago, one of my friends lost their mother. They also welcomed a baby into their family shortly after. I think about that sometimes. One does not replace the other. They don’t. That’s not even what I’m getting at. I think about it because it reminds me that life has a way of holding seemingly contradictory things at once. Grief and joy. Endings and beginnings. The ache of someone no longer being with us, alongside the arrival of someone entirely new.

If we’re fortunate enough to keep living, we will love more people. Build more memories. Create deeper attachments. We will experience new faces, places, chapters, and new versions of ourselves. And one day, many of those things will change too.

That’s frightening, very much so. But the fact that we will grieve again means that we will continue building lives filled with things worth missing.

Because if grief is the price of loving something enough for its absence to be felt, then perhaps grief is evidence that we showed up. We were present. We cared. We lived and we loved, wildly enough, for it to leave a mark.

We are all grieving something.

— Priyanka, India