Grief does not follow a timetable. It does not offer explanations, and it does not conform to our ideas about healing. No one can give you advice about the proper way to grieve, except to respect the process.
This reflection is not about recovery or closure. It is about my experience of what remains after grief has done its fiercest work: how sorrow reshapes us, how life continues, and how joy, unexpectedly, can coexist with irreversible loss.
When my daughter, Deborah, was about ten years old, she told me she was going to die of leukemia. I found it odd and told her she was being ridiculous. Years later, in her late thirties, she repeated the same statement to a friend. She was diagnosed when she was forty-five and died of leukemia at fifty, after two unsuccessful bone marrow transplants. She left behind two young children, a husband, a brother, a father, a stepfather—and me.
What does this tell us about the nature of time? Perhaps it is not linear as we imagine it to be. Perhaps there are ways of knowing that our culture dismisses. We ridicule precognition and prophecy, preferring what can be quantified, yet sometimes life reveals something that does not fit our models.
Deborah’s illness unfolded over five years. Dedicated doctors, loving family members, and devoted friends accompanied her on her journey. We did everything humanly possible. Like in the Humpty Dumpty children’s rhyme, all our efforts could not put her back together again.
My grief over the loss of my only child consisted of nearly a year of crying. Before this, I did not understand grief. I had known disappointments and hurts, like anyone else, but I had not known Grief, capital G.
Grief has a life force of its own. It arrives without warning, overtakes you, and like a tidal wave, topples you. Then it recedes. And just as unpredictably, it returns. You can be going about your day, not thinking about the loss at all, and suddenly you are overcome.
A friend once told me that Grief is “a thing.” At the time, I didn’t quite know what to make of that. Now I understand more. My sense today is that Grief waits—suspended, a universal force, ever ready in the background. Alert to suffering, it moves in when someone experiences profound loss.
It does not care about explanations, blame, or rules. It pushes its way through our efforts to remain in control until, at some point, it either completes its work or retreats, returning less frequently. While grief provokes extreme emotion, it does not itself feel emotional or personal; it operates like a force of nature. And like many forces of nature, it has healing power.
Grief even overcomes the platitudes that friends and relatives feel compelled to offer. Grief is a profoundly personal experience, and others’ opinions, however well-intentioned, may not be helpful.
In my case, I cried for eleven months. Then I stopped crying. My grief was pure, unaccompanied by diversions into blame or guilt.
It has now been five years. The loss has transformed in my psyche. It is no longer an acute wound, but it is present every day, woven into the ordinary fabric of my life—the missing, the missing.
There were moments when blame tempted me. Perhaps the policies of the George Bush administration were responsible, encouraging people to return to work near Ground Zero, where my daughter was employed at the time. Perhaps it was the assurances of the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, that the area surrounding the World Trade Center was safe. Deborah herself was unsure, but she went back anyway.
It is not clear whether that decision contributed to her illness, though she did receive compensation from the World Trade Center Victims Fund. She signed the documents in her final days of consciousness at the City of Hope hospital in Duarte, California.
Some years before, the entertainer Debbie Reynolds’ daughter, Carrie Fisher, Princess Leia of Star Wars fame, died suddenly. Her mother said, “I can’t live without her,” and the next day she suffered a fatal stroke.
I wondered if that would happen to me, so deeply attached to my daughter.
But something unexpected occurred. Despite intense sorrow, I could perceive my life force—vital and strong. Unless I committed violence against myself, I was not going anywhere.
So here I am, left behind, and oddly still experiencing joy and fulfillment despite the missing, despite the sadness.
Death humbles us. It increases tenderness and deepens awareness of life’s gifts and of its fragility. I may feel sad—more intensely sometimes than others—but I also feel love and joy for the time we had together. I can work with conviction.
I know my experience of grief would have been different without the awareness I gained from years of disciplined self-study. That awareness did not protect me from pain. It did not spare me from loss. But it made the pain more endurable for I deeply understood how little control we have over the most important aspects of our lives.
I know I was not perfect. I realize that some decisions, in retrospect, may not have been the best. But I also know that we all,family and friends, worked extraordinarily hard to support her: medically, emotionally, spiritually. And because of that, I do not reproach myself. I do not blame the doctors or curse politicians.
Instead, I cried and cried.
And then, slowly, I rejoined life.
People tell me I look well. They even say I look younger.
Life is mysterious. We often complain that life is disappointing, but life is simply life. Our disappointment arises from the expectations of the ego: that we will be protected from hardship, that our dreams will unfold exactly as we imagine, that we will not be betrayed or wounded.
When grief visits, you come to know that there is suffering that cannot be alleviated with analysis. People arrive in our lives as a gift. Sometimes they leave.
Love does not guarantee permanence.
Only later, after the crying stopped, did the quieter and more difficult question of meaning arise.
My work did not protect me from pain.
It allowed me to continue to live with conviction,
and sometimes even with joy.
©2025 Shulamit Elson