09/01/2026
Today is National Grief Awareness Day.
Every year, we come back to how strange it is that grief is something almost everyone will experience, yet most people arrive at it completely unprepared.
Grief is still treated like a sometimes-subject. But every day, in every space, we are surrounded by people grieving. Many do it silently, feeling there are only rare moments when it is okay to talk about it.
So today, we want to say a few things plainly.
Grief is a normal, natural human experience. You do not need to rush to cure it, like a virus, or exorcise it, like a demon. What often eases over time is the intensity of the early pain. The grief itself, and the love underneath it, does not simply disappear.
There is also no single version of "normal" grief.
Grief can look like sadness, numbness, anger, relief, forgetfulness, laughter, or feeling fine for weeks before falling apart at a gas station for no reason you can name. All of this can exist within the broad, complicated, deeply human experience of grieving.
What makes grief harder for many people is the gap between what they expected grief to look like and what it actually is. Most of us learned about grief from movies, well-meaning relatives, and a culture that often reaches for platitudes when it does not know what to say.
Whatever your grief looks like, however long it has been, and whatever kind of loss brought you here, your grief makes sense in the context of your life, your loss, and your love.
After more than a decade of writing about grief, we keep returning to this: make a little more space for grief to exist. In conversation. In community. In ourselves.
If you are grieving, you are not alone. If you love someone who is grieving, the most helpful thing you can offer is often not advice. It is presence.
We are glad you are here.
