Grief Comes in Waves

Grief, I have come to understand, is a quiet enigma - not constant, not predictable, but something that rises and falls without warning. It comes in waves. Sometimes gentle, almost bearable. Other times overwhelming, arriving with a force that doesn’t ask for permission and cannot be reasoned with.

The first time I truly felt it was three weeks after the passing of my beautiful wife. I was sitting alone in an airport terminal in China, waiting for a layover on my way to Thailand. Everything around me felt ordinary. People moving, conversations passing, the low hum of travel continuing as if nothing in the world had changed. And then, without warning, an Olivia Dean song played through my headphones.

One of her favorites that she listened to before passing.

A wave rose up from somewhere deep within me - fast, heavy, and uncontrollable. Emotion rushed through my chest, tightening around my heart, forcing tears to spill down my face before I could even make sense of what was happening. Love and pain pulsed through my heart, until there was no longer a difference between them.

I felt the eyes of strangers begin to turn toward me, and with that came a sudden sense of shame. I tried to hide it - to lower my head, to quiet myself, to regain control. But grief does not respond to control. It does not soften because it is inconvenient. It does not wait until you are alone.

The wave came anyway.

And in that moment, sitting in a crowded terminal on the other side of the world, I realised something I hadn’t yet understood - that grief is not something you move on from. It is something you move with. It rises, it falls, and sometimes it crashes straight through you, leaving you exposed in places you didn’t know could be seen.

That was the first wave.