Loud Silence ⭐️
Grief is when you discover how loud silence is.
Before loss, silence is something we rarely think about. It’s just the space between sounds, a pause in a conversation, a moment of calm before the day begins. It’s empty, almost invisible. But after loss, silence becomes something else entirely. It becomes its own kind of noise. Heavy. Deafening. Inescapable.
When someone you love dies, silence isn't quiet anymore. It's what's left behind. It follows you like a shadow into every room, every task, every breath. You begin to notice all the sounds that aren’t there. The voice you loved. The rustling of their movements in another room. The rhythm of their daily routine. Now replaced by a stillness so sharp it aches.
The morning after mom died, I felt numb, exhausted, relieved, heartbroken. I lit a candle for her, one that would burn for seven days, and placed a single flower in a vase beside it. A small ritual. A gesture of love and mourning.
Then I realized, I could make coffee now. I could play music. I could answer a phone call. All those years of tiptoeing through my mornings, waiting for her to emerge around 11, were gone. No more hushing the house. No more muting alarms, hushing dogs, or delaying the grinding of morning coffee.
And yet, I couldn’t bring myself to disturb the silence. Because it was already too loud.
I moved like a whisper through the morning. I wrapped a towel around the coffee grinder, hunched my body over it like I could somehow muffle the sound further. I winced at the kettle’s whistle. I flinched at the sound of footsteps of the morning walkers on my street and the bark of a dog off in the distance. Every sound felt like an intrusion. Every gesture toward normal life seemed like a betrayal of the sacred stillness that had taken her place.
The silence had become a shrine. And I was terrified to disturb it.
Grief is strange like that. It’s not just pain. It’s everything around the pain. The rituals, the avoidance, the things that feel too loud and the things that are too quiet. It’s not linear, not clean.
But even in its harshest moments, grief is also just love. It is the echo of what was real and meaningful. We feel the silence so deeply because we loved so deeply. And trust, with time, the silence won’t always scream, but will begin to speak more softly.
But until then, we will light our candles. We will move gently. We will sit in the deafening silence, not because we want to, but because it is the only way we know how to honor what was lost.
And somehow, in that stillness, love lingers.
