Read Their Stories
Universal Grieving Stories
Grief can feel isolating, but here, you are not alone. These are real stories—testimonies of love, loss, resilience, and remembrance. Through their words, you may find comfort, understanding, and a connection to your own journey.
Each story is proof of the bonds we carry with us, even after loss. Grief is not just sorrow—it is love that refuses to fade. Take your time, explore these heartfelt journeys, and find strength in shared experiences.
Find Stories That Speak to You:
Grief is deeply personal, but that doesn’t mean you have to carry it alone. Click through to discover voices that echo your emotions, remind you of shared strength, and offer the comfort of knowing others have walked this path too.
Not every story has a resolution, and not every grief finds closure. But through connection, we can hold each other up in the heaviness of loss.
💬 A Note Before You Read
Every story here comes from different places—collected from friends, family, online reflections, and even my own personal experiences. Some are brief moments of grief, others unfold in deep, emotional journeys.
Take what resonates. Leave what doesn’t. And know that, in reading, you are walking alongside others who have felt this too.
🕊️ Which Story Needs to Be Heard?
You Don't Have To Walk Alone
Grief doesn’t fit into neat little boxes. It doesn’t always follow a clear path. Sometimes, it’s loud and overwhelming. Other times, it’s quiet, slipping into the moments between breaths. It can come from losing someone, losing something, or even losing a version of yourself you thought would always be there.
Maybe your loss doesn’t fit into a single category. Maybe it’s layered, messy, complicated. Maybe you don’t even have the words to explain why it hurts—only that it does. And that’s okay. Grief isn’t something that needs to be justified.
Here, you’ll find stories from others who have walked through their own losses—some expected, some sudden, some that changed them forever. No matter what kind of grief you’re carrying, you don’t have to carry it alone.
Because even when the world feels heavy, even when there are no answers, there is still comfort in knowing that others have felt this too.
🕯️ Need Support in Your Grief?
Grief is personal, unpredictable, and different for everyone. If you need space to process, reflect, or simply exist in the weight of it, we have resources that may help.
🕊️ Find comfort, guidance, and reflections on grief.
Grief is love that has nowhere to go. If you’re looking for ways to honor what you’ve lost, to find meaning in the memories, or simply to hold onto the love that remains, you are not alone in that.
🎁 Explore ways to keep their memory alive
🎁 Holding Onto What Matters
Grief & Solace
💭 When Grief Touches Everything
“I never realized how deeply grief could affect every corner of my life—my energy, my immune system, even my sense of who I was.”
In Her Own Words:
grief isn’t just sadness. it’s exhaustion. it’s waking up feeling like you ran a marathon in your sleep. it’s forgetting things you used to know by heart. it’s catching every cold, every headache, every little thing your body suddenly has no energy to fight off.
it’s standing in the middle of a room, unable to remember what you came in for. it’s losing track of time, feeling like the days blend together, like the world is moving but you’re stuck in place.
it’s food tasting different, sounds feeling too loud, the world sitting too heavy on your shoulders. it’s looking in the mirror and barely recognizing the tired eyes staring back at you.
people say grief is just emotions. but it’s more than that. it’s physical. it drains you in ways no one warns you about. and when it lingers, when the tiredness doesn’t go away, when your body still feels like it’s carrying a weight it doesn’t know how to set down, it’s easy to wonder—am i broken?
but i learned something: i’m not broken. i’m grieving. my body is grieving. and it’s doing what it has to do to survive.
knowing that doesn’t fix it. but it helps. and sometimes, that’s enough.
— Andrea G.
Here, you can find deeper support: Explore more on grief’s physical impact
Find ways to celebrate what matters most: Discover meaningful ways to support healing
⏳ Healing Isn’t Passive
“I kept waiting for time to fix everything, and when it didn’t, I felt hopeless. Learning that I had to actively work through my grief was the turning point in my healing.”
In Her Own Words:
people kept saying, *give it time*. like time was some kind of medicine that would slowly make the pain go away. so i waited. days, weeks, months. but nothing changed.
grief didn’t dissolve. it didn’t soften on its own. it sat there, heavy, unmoving. and the longer i waited for it to *fix itself*, the more stuck i felt.
then, slowly, i realized—healing wasn’t just going to *happen*. i had to meet it halfway. i had to let myself feel, talk about it, write it down, move through it instead of around it. i had to actively *choose* healing, even when it felt impossible.
time isn’t what makes grief easier. it’s what we do *with* that time that does.
and that realization? that changed everything.
— Marina L.
Here, you can find deeper support: Explore more on the process of healing
Find ways to celebrate what matters most: Discover meaningful ways to honor healing
🧠 When Grief Changes Your Mind
“I thought my mind was betraying me, but learning there was a real scientific explanation helped me be kinder to myself.”
In Her Own Words:
grief made me forget things. lose track of time. struggle to focus on even the simplest tasks. i thought i was losing my mind—like the person i used to be had disappeared along with the person i lost.
but then i learned something: grief isn’t just emotional. it’s *physical*. it changes how the brain works. it interrupts memory, distorts time, drains energy. and knowing that? knowing i wasn’t just “failing” to cope, but experiencing something real, something *explainable*—that changed everything.
grief wasn’t my mind betraying me. it was my mind trying to protect me, to adjust, to make sense of something it never wanted to understand.
learning that didn’t take the pain away. but it did help me be gentler with myself. and sometimes, that’s enough.
— Marisa V.
Here, you can find deeper support: Explore more on the science of grief
Find ways to celebrate what matters most: Discover meaningful ways to honor healing
🕰️ When Time Isn’t Enough
“I kept telling myself, ‘Time will fix this,’ but the emptiness wouldn’t budge. Learning the difference between normal mourning and deeper despair finally helped me find the support I needed.”
In His Own Words:
for a long time, i waited. waited for the sadness to fade, for the weight in my chest to lift, for the world to start making sense again. people said time would help. that one day, i’d wake up and it wouldn’t hurt as much.
but the days passed, then weeks, then months. and nothing changed. the emptiness didn’t soften. the world still felt hollow. it wasn’t just grief anymore—it was something heavier, something that swallowed everything else.
i thought maybe i was doing it wrong. maybe i wasn’t strong enough. maybe i just needed to *try harder* to move on.
but then i learned—sometimes, grief lingers not because we’re weak, but because we need more than time. we need help. we need support. we need to acknowledge that some losses shake us so deeply, we can’t find our way out alone.
getting support didn’t erase the loss. but it gave me something i hadn’t felt in a long time—hope. and that? that was the first real step toward healing.
— Darren M.
Here, you can find deeper support: Explore more on complicated grief
Find ways to celebrate what matters most: Discover meaningful ways to honor healing
🔄 Grief Doesn’t Follow a Script
“I thought moving through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance would be neat and orderly—but my grief had its own rhythm. Learning I wasn’t ‘failing’ by looping back to anger was a huge relief.”
In Her Own Words:
i thought i’d follow the stages of grief like a checklist. denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—one after the other, until i came out the other side. but that’s not how it worked.
one day, i felt okay. the next, i was furious. then i thought i’d made peace—until something small, something random, sent me spiraling all over again. for a while, i thought i was doing it wrong. wasn’t i supposed to be “moving forward”? wasn’t i supposed to be *getting better*?
but then i learned—grief isn’t linear. it’s not a staircase you climb. it loops, it twists, it comes back when you least expect it. *and that’s normal.*
realizing that took the pressure off. i wasn’t failing. i wasn’t stuck. i was just grieving in the way that *grief actually works*—messy, unpredictable, and completely human.
and that? that made all the difference.
— Jennifer B.
Here, you can find deeper support: Explore more on the realities of grief
Find ways to celebrate what matters most: Discover meaningful ways to honor healing
⏳ Grieving in the In-Between
“I started grieving my partner the moment doctors said our time was limited. No one told me how heavy that in-between would feel.”
In Her Own Words:
grief didn’t wait. it started the moment they said the words. the moment i realized our future wasn’t open-ended anymore.
no one tells you how hard it is to grieve while someone is still here. to wake up every day knowing what’s coming but not knowing *how* to prepare for it. to feel the loss before it even happens, carrying it in the quiet moments, in the hospital visits, in the way their voice sounds when they say, *i love you*, and you wonder how many more times you’ll hear it.
there’s no roadmap for this. no guide on how to balance loving someone and mourning them at the same time. it’s an in-between space, too full of love to let go, too full of loss to feel whole.
i don’t have all the answers. but i know this—grief doesn’t mean i love them any less. if anything, it means i love them more. enough to feel it now. enough to carry it for both of us.
— Amelia J.
Here, you can find deeper support: Explore more on anticipatory grief
Find ways to celebrate what matters most: Discover meaningful ways to honor love through loss
🐾 Grief That Deserved to Be Seen
“I couldn’t stop crying over losing my pet, but everyone around me acted like it was trivial. That only made my grief more painful.”
In His Own Words:
“it was just a pet.” that’s what they said. like losing them shouldn’t hurt this much. like i should be able to shake it off, move on, get over it.
but what they didn’t understand was that *he wasn’t just a pet.* he was comfort on bad days. he was unconditional love in the purest form. he was part of my life, my routine, my home. and when he was gone, it didn’t just feel like losing an animal—it felt like losing *a piece of myself.*
grief doesn’t care what people think should hurt. it hurts because it mattered. because *they* mattered.
so yeah, i cried. more than i expected. more than they thought was “reasonable.” but i won’t apologize for it. because love is love, and loss is loss, no matter what shape it comes in.
— Timothy G.
Here, you can find deeper support: Explore more on pet loss & unrecognized grief
Find ways to celebrate what matters most: Discover meaningful ways to honor beloved pets
🫀 When Grief Lives in the Body
“I thought I’d just be sad, but I never expected the fatigue, the brain fog, and the racing heart. Understanding that these physical signs were normal really helped me cope.”
In Her Own Words:
i expected the sadness. the waves of emotion, the moments of missing them so much i couldn’t breathe. but what i *didn’t* expect? the exhaustion so heavy it felt impossible to move. the brain fog that made simple tasks feel overwhelming. the way my heart raced at random, like my body was stuck in fight-or-flight mode.
for a while, i thought something was wrong with me. i thought i was weak, that i wasn’t coping “right.” but then i learned—grief isn’t just in your mind. it’s in your body, too. it *rewires* you. stress hormones spike, sleep patterns break, the nervous system struggles to keep up. all of it is real. all of it is *normal.*
learning that didn’t take the symptoms away. but it did help me be gentler with myself. i wasn’t broken. i wasn’t failing. i was grieving. and my body was just trying to keep up.
knowing that? it made all the difference.
— Marina T.
Here, you can find deeper support: Explore more on grief’s physical impact
Find ways to celebrate what matters most: Discover meaningful ways to support healing