Time is a healer. Unless it's not

Grief warps the passing of months and years into a baffling non-linearity. The passage of time can dull the pain, but it can also mess with your head.

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

Time moves differently after loss. It's an odd, disorientating sensation. A simultaneous speeding up and slowing down. The feeling of time as both more solid, and in other moments more abstract, more insubstantial than ever.

Your place in time – how you experience it – alters too.

Before my losses, I always felt myself being pulled through time, whizzing gently forwards, as though holding on to some cosmic travelator with a predictable trajectory. Now, I see myself as standing still, time hurtling through me - a bullet train to the guts. Time still affects me, I still witness it's passing (sometimes with a violent speed), and yet I often perceive myself as static.

For grievers, time takes on a new weight. We are told that time is a healer, that we will feel better after the first year, that we must move forwards towards something brighter and better, away from the sadness.

In the early days of my grief I clung desperately to this idea that the passage of time would fix everything that had broken. I just had to make it through the first year. All the ‘firsts’ without him. A first Christmas, my birthday, his birthday, each season without his presence. I ticked each one off as they passed, pleased to be making progress.

So when I woke up the day after the first anniversary of my dad's death and realised I was still in pain, that nothing had changed, it sent me into a downward spiral that lasted weeks.

Time heals. We say this to grievers because we want to rush them through their pain. We think it's a kindness, that it offers comfort and hope, but it comes from a place of deep discomfort. We don't want to hear about someone's ongoing anguish, we don't want to accept that some pain is eternal, because that's terrifying. But for those of us who feel that time has stopped, an inability to acknowledge the permanence of our pain makes us feel defective.

If time is supposed to be a healer, what happens when it's not?

I don’t want to feel hurried. I want the space to sit with my pain, to sink in to it, to press my finger deep into the bruise and let the hurt spread itself through me. I want it to be understood that some pain alters you permanently, some pain sits in your blood forever. There is no ‘back to normal’, or returning to who I was before.

Rather than pushing people to feel better as quickly as possible, what if we supported them in this new state of being? What if we saw grief as permanent, rather than something to get to the other side of as quickly as possible?

Time, for me, has shifted and moulded my grief, eroded it into something smoother and easier to hold. But it hasn't healed it. And I now find the passage of time completely baffling in a way that I never did before.

What do you mean it has been close to half a decade since I last spoke to my dad? That simply can’t be accurate. It feels wrong and confusing in the same way that the first abrupt, 4pm nightfall is always so shocking after daylight savings. My brain refuses to accept it.

Maybe that’s because there is a part of you that stays in the moment of the loss, or in the 'before'. This would make sense to me. A temporal cleaving in two, where most of you marches forwards into the inevitable ordeal of 'getting on with life', but some of you hangs back, stuck in those moments that no longer exist.

Stuck isn't the right word though. Not for me. Those past moments aren't something I feel trapped in, something I want to escape. They are, instead, a haven, a relief, a place I escape to when the relentless propulsion of life starts to give me motion sickness. It is the present, and the future, that can feel stifling after a loss – not the past.