In the Middle of High-Functioning Grief

Grief doesn't just take something from you. It rearranges you from the inside out. Ten months after losing Haven, I am not the same person I was before her, not in the poetic sense, but in the literal one. My brain works differently. My body responds to the world differently. And I don't think we talk enough about how permanent that shift really is.

If you're grieving something too, some of this might sound familiar.

I forget things now. I lose my train of thought mid-sentence, walk into a room with no idea why I came in. Certain sounds hit me harder than they used to, like my nervous system lost its buffer. I notice other people's kids in a way I never did before, a quiet cataloguing I don't ask for and can't turn off. My mind reaches for the worst-case version of everything, first, before I can stop it. None of this is who I was. Grief changes the brain and body in ways that are well documented: memory, focus, sleep, the nervous system's whole sense of what counts as a threat. This isn't weakness. It's biology responding to something enormous.

Here's what's hardest for people to see. I do all the things. I show up at work. I show up as a wife, as a mom. I do it well enough that people assume I'm fine. But most nights, once the day is finally over, I come undone. My husband is the only one who sees it, the version of me that's left standing after I've spent everything I had just to get through the day. The shell of the woman he married five years ago.

Being high-functioning was never the same thing as being okay. It just means I've gotten good at holding it together for everyone except the one person I don't have to.

Here's what no one tells you about grief. It doesn't move in a straight line, and it doesn't shrink the longer you carry it. Ten months in, I am in some ways more depressed than I was at the start. Nothing dramatic caused that. What changed is quieter. The check-ins stopped. Her name stopped coming up. There's an unspoken assumption that because I function, I must be better, and so the silence around her grows exactly when I need her name spoken more, not less.

There's a name for this, actually. Grief researchers call it disenfranchised grief: loss that the world doesn't quite know how to hold, so it goes unacknowledged, or gets a shorter timeline than it deserves. Losing a baby, especially one that so many people didn't get to meet, often falls into this category. The world moves on faster than the loss does, and grieving parents are left absorbing a kind of social pressure to be further along than they are. I didn't choose this timeline. Nobody grieving does. But I've stopped believing that the quiet, sustained weight of it means I'm doing something wrong.

Showing up doesn't mean you're through it. It just means you've learned how to carry it where people can see you.

Grief doesn't just rearrange the inside of me. It rearranges every relationship around me too. Marriages absorb an enormous amount of strain after a loss like this. My husband and I grieve differently, on different timelines, in different rooms sometimes, and I've felt real resentment build in the space between us when it seems like he's further along than I am, even when I know that's not really true, it's just quieter in him. Friendships shift too. There's a specific kind of loneliness in watching people you love grieve "less than" you, or move on faster, or simply forget, not out of cruelty, just because it isn't their daily weight to carry. It rearranges the lens on everything. Nothing sits the way it used to: not conversations, not plans, not the small things people say without thinking.

And here's a part I almost didn't write, because it feels like the most shameful one. Some days I resent how much I still carry this, every single day, and I feel guilty for that resentment. Not because I don't want to remember her. I will always want to remember her. But carrying that particular weight every waking hour is exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with how much I loved her. Wanting a break from the pain isn't the same as wanting to let go of the child. I've had to learn that distinction for myself, slowly, because no one hands it to you.

There's a version of this same guilt that shows up in motherhood too. I have a living child, and I feel enormous pressure to never let anyone see me overwhelmed by that, because how dare I be anything but endlessly grateful, when I know exactly what it costs to lose one. But grief and gratitude aren't opposites, and being exhausted by motherhood some days doesn't erase how much I wanted this, wanted her, want him. Both things are allowed to be true. I'm still learning to believe that myself.

My faith is part of this too, not the center of it, just one more weight among the others. I know the language of resting in God's hope. I know what I'm supposed to feel handing this over to Him. But resting is hard to access most days, not because I'm angry at God, but because handing over control at all, to anything, to anyone, is something I lost the ability to do the day I lost her.

I'm not writing this from the other side of it. I'm writing it because I think a lot of us are walking around unrecognizable to ourselves, performing our way through days while something else entirely is happening underneath, carrying a grief the world quietly expects us to have finished by now. If that's you too: you are not required to be over it just because you're upright. You're allowed to still be in it, for as long as it takes.