The Grief No One Told Me Would Take This Long

My mother died in Leeds on a Wednesday morning in November, unexpectedly, of a heart attack at 58. I was 24 years old and it was the first significant death I had experienced.

I had no framework for what came next and so I borrowed one from the vague cultural script that surrounded me - you are sad for a while, you have good days and bad days, and eventually it recedes and you get back to your life. I gave myself about six months.

At six months I was not back to my life. I was functioning - going to work, paying my bills, maintaining friendships at a surface level - but there was a flatness under everything that I could not seem to shake.

I stopped expecting it to lift and started feeling quietly ashamed that it had not. Friends who had been enormously supportive in the first months had naturally returned to their own lives, and the grief, now a year old, felt like something I was supposed to have processed by then.

I did not talk about it because it felt like an overstay, an imposition, evidence that I was not coping as well as I should be. The second year was in some ways harder than the first because it was lonelier.

In the first year, my mother's absence was acute and dramatic - a shock that people could see and respond to. In the second year it was the quieter grief of ordinary moments: the phone call I kept almost making, the Sunday roast at my parents' house that had changed shape permanently, the milestones she would not be there for.

I went to a grief counsellor at 26 - two years after she died - partly because a friend who had lost her father recommended it and partly because I had run out of explanations for why I was still not all right.

The counsellor told me something that I needed a professional to say before I would believe it: there is no timeline for grief. The idea that you should be over a loss within a certain period is a social construct with no basis in how human beings actually process the permanent absence of someone they loved.

She also told me that what I was experiencing - the grief that surfaced in ordinary moments long after the acute stage had passed - was not a sign of abnormal attachment or failure to cope. It was the normal experience of loving someone who was no longer there.

I am 30 now and I still grieve my mother, though differently than I did at 24. It no longer ambushes me daily. It arrives in waves, sometimes predictable and sometimes not, and I have learned to let it move through rather than managing it into invisibility.

The most useful thing I did was stop trying to be over it on someone else's schedule.