Grief is not supposed to look the way you might be feeling it. The cultural image of grief is tearful and quiet — a person sitting at a window, looking into the distance, missing someone. What the image does not show is the anger. The pure, hot, sometimes terrifying rage that arrives alongside the sadness and sometimes eclipses it entirely.
You may be furious at the disease that took them. At the medical system that did not save them. At friends who have disappeared. At people who still have the person you lost. At the universe for being so brutally indifferent. At your loved one, even — for leaving, for not fighting harder, for not letting you say what you needed to say. If this last one is you, know that anger at someone who has died is one of the most common and least discussed experiences in grief, and it does not make you a bad person. It makes you someone who is in pain.
Anger in grief is often a form of protest. It is the part of you that refuses to accept what has happened, that demands a different outcome, that insists this is not okay — because it is not. What happened is not okay. Your loved one is gone, and that is genuinely wrong, and being furious about it is a completely rational response.
The problem is not the anger itself. The problem is when anger gets stuck — when it cannot move through you and transform, when it hardens into bitterness that cuts you off from connection and from your own life. Moving anger through the body matters. Physical exercise, crying, writing, allowing yourself to say the unsayable in a journal or with a trusted therapist — these all help anger do what it needs to do, which is move.
Do not let anyone rush you past your anger into acceptance. "You need to let it go" and "they wouldn't want you to be angry" are sentences that may be meant kindly but function as instructions to suppress something real. You will come to acceptance in your own time, on your own terms. The anger is part of the journey, not a detour from it.
And underneath the anger, almost always, is love. Rage is love with nowhere to go. You are this angry because you loved this much. That is not something to be ashamed of. It is one of the truest things about you.