People think time fixes things, but really you just get better at not crying in the grocery store aisle.
C.G. Thomas
People love to put a timeline on someone else’s heartache. When the ground first fell out from beneath me, the common refrain was always, “Give it time. It gets easier.” They meant well. We say things like that because sitting in the silence of another person’s devastation makes us uncomfortable, so we reach for whatever greeting-card phrase is within arm’s reach.
Seven years later, I can tell you that is the biggest lie we tell the grieving.
It does not get easier. The calendar flips, the seasons change, and the world insists on moving forward at an exhausting pace, but grief doesn’t care about a calendar. Some mornings, I wake up and seven years feels like seven seconds.
One of the quietest cruelties of time is that you eventually run out of new pictures.
You find yourself scrolling back through your camera roll, flipping through the same photo albums, staring at the exact same smiles, the same outfits, the same frozen moments you’ve looked at a thousand times before. And then it hits you all over again: there will never be another birthday snapshot, another candid laugh caught mid-frame, or another blurry photo taken in bad lighting. That archive is closed.
That realization has a way of resetting the entire clock. In a split second, all the progress you thought you made evaporates, and you are right back at day one, standing in the raw shock of the absence.
What actually happens over seven years isn’t that the pain shrinks. You just learn how to carry it without dropping everything else in your hands. You learn how to hold a regular conversation while a part of your soul is quietly standing in an empty room. You learn that a random memory or an old photo can dismantle weeks of feeling “fine” in an instant.
I used to think struggling with bouts of grief this far down the road meant I was doing something wrong—that maybe I was failing some invisible test of moving on. But Kenyada’s absence isn’t a problem to be solved or a phase to outgrow. The grief is still here because the love is still here.
So if you’re standing years into a loss and wondering why your chest still aches like it happened this morning, let yourself off the hook. You haven’t backtracked. The clock just reset for a moment, and that’s okay. You’re simply carrying a love that outlived the physical space it was given.
Seven years hasn’t dulled the edge, but it has taught me this: I don’t need the pain to disappear to keep living. I just have to let the memories breathe, honor the ache when it restarts the clock, and keep putting one foot in front of the other. I hope you’ve enjoyed your view inside the mind of Sugar Clark.
Be blessed!
