“Time heals all wounds,” people say when someone we love dies. It’s a phrase offered like a Band-Aid for a broken bone. Well meaning, but inadequate for the depth of what we’re facing.
For those who have lost a daughter, a son, a spouse, a parent, a sibling, a dear friend, the truth is something different. Time doesn’t heal. It changes things, yes. It allows us to move, to function, to smile even, but it does not erase their absence. That lives inside us, a permanent resident.
When I searched for quotes and stories from others who had walked this path before me (writers, psychologists, fellow travelers through loss), I discovered that my feelings aren’t unique or abnormal.
The bereaved across time echo the same truths I’m living.
I’ve heard that grief follows a pattern of denial, anger, bargaining, withdrawal, and finally, acceptance. That may all be true. It sounds like a clean process. Just a series of steps we must go through to get to the other side.
But that path has no clean endpoint. It can stall, restart at the beginning, skip and repeat steps while never reaching a conclusion. The grieving process never ends. We merely learn to function with our grief, and we do so in our own way, as imperfectly as we do everything else in life.
Author Jamie Anderson found words for what many of us feel but struggle to express: “Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
This captures exactly what happens when we reach for the phone to call them or save up a story we can’t wait to tell them. Only to remember a second later that they’re gone.
Grief isn’t a single event but a series of small realizations, each one a fresh cut.
C.S. Lewis, after losing his wife Joy, wrote about the persistence of absence: “Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.” In his book “A Grief Observed,” Lewis documented what it feels like to live inside loss. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed.”
This is the lived experience of a body trying to process what the mind struggles to accept.
Joan Didion echoed this truth when she lost her husband, John Gregory Dunne. In “The Year of Magical Thinking,” she wrote, “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. It’s a foreign country with its own customs, its own weather, its own bewildering geography.”
There is no timeline. No tidy arc where pain transforms into peace according to some predetermined set of rules.
Dr. Lois Tonkin, working as a grief counselor in the 1990s, discovered a different truth about what healing actually looks like. A client whose child had died years earlier drew her a picture showing how her grief had initially filled her entire life. A small circle almost completely consumed by loss.
But over time, something unexpected happened. The grief didn’t shrink. Instead, her life grew larger around it. There was now space for new experiences, relationships, and meaning alongside the loss. This became known as Tonkin’s Model of Grief.
Like a tree growing around a piece of metal embedded in its trunk. We don’t absorb or eliminate the foreign object. We grow around it, incorporating it into our new shape.
This model shows us that time doesn’t diminish our grief. But it expands our capacity to hold other things along with it. Some days our grief surprises us with its suddenness. A song, a scent, a birthday or anniversary, seeing a classic car they used to drive. Other days we’re living fully in the expanded space around our grief, discovering we can hold both the wound and the wonder.
We must learn to carry the sharp pain of their absence while having gratitude for the gift of having known them at all. Our capacity to feel gratitude for the life we shared can provide much needed comfort, even though we’ll never stop missing them.
Some of the most tender truths come from those who’ve lost children. Elizabeth Edwards, who lost her 16-year-old son Wade in a car accident, offered this reminder, “If you know someone who has lost a child, and you’re afraid to mention them because you think you might make them sad by reminding them that they died, you’re not reminding them. They didn’t forget they died. What you’re reminding them of is that you remembered that they lived, and that is a great gift.”
Writer Megan O’Rourke, in her memoir “The Long Goodbye” about losing her mother, captured the peculiar contrasts of grief. “You look fine. You act fine. But inside, you are not fine. And you know it will never be the same.”
This is the hard reality of grief. The simultaneous existence of functioning and not-functioning, of healing and not-healing, of being okay and not-okay. We learn to carry both states, often within the same moments.
So no, time does not heal all wounds.
Time teaches us that we can be broken and whole simultaneously. That we can miss someone terribly and still find reasons to laugh. That love doesn’t end with death. It merely changes form, expressed as the very grief we wish we could escape.
In learning to live with our wounds, we hopefully discover something about ourselves. Our capacity to grieve deeply is evidence of our capacity to love more deeply than we ever thought possible.
And maybe that’s the real truth about time and grief.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” – Mathew 5:4
“The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.” – Psalm 34:18
“Love never ends.” – 1 Corinthians 13:8
Photo by Noah Silliman on Unsplash
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