I used to believe that grief was a weight I would carry forever. That the more I loved, the heavier it ought to feel. In a way, that’s true. The deeper the love, the deeper the sorrow when that person’s not there anymore. It’s a lesson I learned when I lost my mom just before I turned fifteen.
There was, of course, intense grief after she passed, but the grief continued to show up in everything that followed. The good days were tempered because she wasn’t there to share them with. The bad days were even worse because she wasn’t there for me to hug. She couldn’t tell me that everything would be alright.
That grief became the watermark. I measured every storm that came after against it.
For years, I thought that’s just how it worked. You carried it, like it was just part of who you were. You build a life with it stitched into everything.
The pain did fade with time. I still think about her every day, but I stopped thinking about how much the loss hurt a long time ago.
Then came 2017.
We’d known it was a possibility. My wife had a family history, so we were watching carefully. But no amount of caution prepares you for the moment you hear the word.
Cancer.
Even with that season behind us now, typing that word brings a flicker of the deep panic I felt when her diagnosis came.
Her doctor caught it early, when the tumor was still small and hadn’t impacted any of the surrounding tissue. Surgery happened. She didn’t need chemo or radiation. The surgeon told me, “I can’t legally say we got 100% of the cancer, but the surgery was a success.”
It was the best possible version of bad news.
But it still wrecked me.
I wasn’t wrecked just because I was afraid, but because I’d spent so many years — really since my mother passed away — building up a belief that I had to be strong. That I wasn’t allowed to be scared. Besides, I had a good friend whose wife had literally died during her cancer treatments. She was clinically dead before a miracle brought her back. She survived, but only after a brutal fight. Compared to that, how could I justify my worry?
One morning, that same friend took me running up a beautiful canyon trail. He listened without interrupting as I poured out my chaotic thoughts and feelings. I told him I felt selfish for how scared I was compared to what he dealt with.
He wasn’t upset. He didn’t try to reframe what I was dealing with against the nightmare he had lived. He nodded, looked at me with so much compassion in his eyes, and said, “We’re all running our own race. There’s no point in comparing your life to anyone else’s. This is your lived experience. Nobody else can live it for you.”
I’ve told him over and over since what a gift that was.
We ended up in a meadow. The first bloom of wild strawberries peeked through the vines. A rock sat just above a small stream, shaped like a chair — like it had been waiting for someone to sit and fall apart.
He pointed at that rock and told me about how often he’d cried sitting there. He put his hand on my shoulder, nodded at the rock, then walked away.
The tears started pouring down my face before I could even sit. I buried my face in my hands. And I let go, for just a few minutes, of the need to be composed, to be rational, to be strong, to be “grateful it wasn’t worse.”
I cried hard. I let the sobs wrack my whole body. I didn’t make any attempt to control the emotion flooding out of me.
Then, when the tears slowed, I looked up. The morning light was filtering through the trees. The little brook we’d crossed babbled to one side. My friend stood quietly down the path, not rushing me.
It was the first time in a really long time that I remember feeling something shift inside me. In the moment, it didn’t feel subtle, but it was something that would slowly continue to unfold — often hampered by my own desire to keep it all together when I knew I was falling apart.
Just one surgery and no further treatment. My wife recovered completely; became the healthiest she’s ever been. I got the best outcome I could have hoped for.
But grief didn’t care. It had already started writing its next chapter — embedding itself in my routines, pressing into the edges of everything like it had when I was a teenager.
This time, though, I noticed.
I noticed how sorrow doesn’t ever ask for permission. It just creeps in and settles down like it belongs. There are times when grief and sorrow do belong, but I caught myself treating sadness like a kind of emotional currency — like if I felt it deeply enough, maybe it would protect me from future loss, or somehow earn me comfort I didn’t think I deserved.
It sounds illogical, but it was real. I knew my wife was going to be okay, and yet I kept living like the next heartbreak was already scheduled. Like bracing for it gave me some control.
At the same time, and in a strange way, I think I felt guilty for not suffering more. As if I was betraying the grief I’d carried for my mother by not letting this one cut as deep. So I let it. I leaned in. I invited it to stay.
But sitting on that rock — face in my hands, letting it all pour out — I felt something crack. Something untrue. I was clinging to an old idea that grief was sacred, that it had to be “performed” to be respected. That if I let go, I’d be forgetting.
I wasn’t.
I was learning.
And maybe that’s what I finally stopped carrying.
Not the memories. Not the losses. But the belief that grief was something noble, maybe, to hold onto forever. That being broken was proof I’d loved well. That if I let myself feel joy too freely, I might be betraying the people or pain I’d left behind.
It’s not that grief disappeared. It still comes. Especially in quiet moments when I’m alone with my thoughts. Or when I hear a song my mom used to sing off-key in the car. Or when I watch my wife brushing her hair in the mirror and remember how afraid I was to lose her.
But I don’t hold it the same way now. I don’t treat it like a legacy I’m obligated to carry.
I’ve come to believe that grief can outlive its purpose. It can masquerade as loyalty when really it’s just habit. It can distort your view of everything bright because it wants to stay center stage. And worst of all, it can keep you from noticing other people’s pain because you’re too entangled in your own.
I’ve done that. I’ve missed chances to lift others because I was too caught up in silently proving how heavy my own burdens were.
There’s a man I used to know. When he was ninety years old, he was as sharp as ever. One day he said to me, “You can never be happier than your saddest child.” At the time, I just nodded politely, but later, I couldn’t shake how heartbreaking that was. He had accepted sorrow as some kind of ceiling for his joy. He’d bound himself to the pain of someone he loved, and called that love.
But love doesn’t mean drowning with someone. Love means swimming with all you’ve got to hopefully save your life and theirs. Love sometimes means building a boat.
And sometimes the boat looks like a rock in a meadow. Or a friend who says, “You don’t have to compare this to anything.” Or the first green leaves on strawberry vines that haven’t yet borne fruit… but will.
That was one of the darkest seasons of my life.
But there was brightness in it too. There was a sunrise. There were trees. There were friends who didn’t try to fix me. They just stood nearby. There was my wife who healed. And there was something else I couldn’t name until later.
Permission.
To grieve. To stop grieving. To remember without anchoring my joy to loss. To cry and then keep running.
It’s taken me a long time to learn the lesson that joy doesn’t have to wait until everything is better or safe. I can honor what I’ve lost without building my identity around it. I’m still learning to be okay with feeling what I feel without downplaying it because someone had it worse.
And that is enough.
Thanks for reading, and before you go. . .
I’m Aaron Pace. I write from the middle of things — life, business, fatherhood, faith, and the slow work of becoming someone I can live with. Not as an expert, but as someone trying to pay attention.
If this piece resonated with you, I’d be honored if you followed along here on Medium. I write — not because I’ve arrived, but because I’m finally moving again.
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