If you have lost someone to cancer, chances are you have heard some version of these well-meaning but deeply unhelpful statements: "It's been six months — aren't you feeling better?" "You should be moving on by now." "They wouldn't want you to be sad forever." These words, however kindly intended, carry an implicit message that grief has an expiration date — that at some point, you should be "over it." But grief does not work that way, and anyone who has truly lost someone knows this in their bones.
The idea that grief follows a neat timeline — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — has been deeply ingrained in our culture, but it was never meant to be a prescription. Those stages were originally observed in people facing their own terminal diagnosis, not in the bereaved, and even their creator later clarified that they were never meant to be linear or universal. Real grief is messy. It spirals. It ambushes you in the cereal aisle of the grocery store eighteen months after your loss. It lets you have a good week and then floors you on a random Tuesday. This is not a failure of healing. This is simply what love looks like when it has lost its destination.
You may find that some people in your life grow impatient with your grief. They may stop asking how you are doing. They may change the subject when you mention your loved one. They may suggest, gently or not so gently, that it is time to move forward. This says far more about their discomfort with grief than it does about your process. Loss makes people uncomfortable because it reminds them of their own vulnerability. Do not let their discomfort dictate the pace of your healing.
Give yourself full, unconditional permission to grieve for as long as you need to. If you need to cry on the anniversary five years from now, cry. If you need to talk about them at dinner ten years from now, talk about them. If the sight of their favorite flower still makes your chest ache twenty years from now, let it ache. That ache is not a wound that failed to heal — it is the ongoing pulse of a love that refuses to die.
At the same time, giving yourself permission to grieve also means giving yourself permission to heal. It means allowing yourself moments of lightness without interpreting them as betrayal. It means accepting that you can carry both sorrow and joy, sometimes in the very same breath. Healing does not mean the pain is gone. It means you have found a way to carry it that allows you to keep living.
There is no finish line for grief. There is no point at which someone will hand you a certificate that says you have grieved enough and are now officially healed. What there is, eventually, is a gradual expansion — your world, which contracted so violently around the point of loss, slowly begins to open again. Not because the loss becomes smaller, but because you become large enough to hold both the loss and the life that continues around it. Trust that expansion. It is not a betrayal of your love. It is a testament to your resilience.