06/13/2026
Did you ever notice how grief turns us into mathematicians.
After my loss…I found myself counting everything.
Not just the days since my person died, but the hours, the minutes, and sometimes even the seconds. I knew exactly how long it was since I heard their voice, saw their face, or held their hand. Somehow my brain kept track of it all whether I wanted it to or not.
I don't think I was consciously trying to do it. It just happened. Every morning I would wake up and know the number. One hundred days. Six months. One year. Five years.
The number became attached to everything.
I've talked to thousands of grieving people over the years, and I've discovered this isn't unusual at all. Most of us do this grief math.
We count birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays we survived. We calculate how old they would be today. We figure out how many years we've lived without them and compare it to how many years we had with them. We count firsts, seconds, and thirds. Sometimes we count all the way to ten years and beyond.
Here’s the thing…usually the rest of the world stops counting long before we do.
For most people, the loss eventually becomes a date on a calendar. But for the person living with the grief, that number can feel permanently etched into their heart. We don't remember it because we're dwelling on the past. We remember it because the person we lost is still part of our present.
I think grief math is our mind's way of trying to understand something that doesn't make sense. How can someone be gone for five years when it feels like yesterday? How can twelve years pass when part of you still expects them to walk through the door?
The numbers become our attempt to measure an absence that can't really be measured.
Eventually, many of us stop counting every single day. The math becomes less important. But that doesn't happen because we love them less. It happens because we learn something that grief spends years trying to teach us. That love isn't measured by how long someone’s been gone.
It's measured by how much they remain part of who we are.
Even now, more than twelve years after my loss, I still catch myself doing the math sometimes.
And I suspect many of you do too.
Gary Sturgis
Author of: ‘SURVIVING GRIEF – 365 Days A Year’
