We often expect grief to behave linearly.

We imagine it arriving in orderly stages, gradually softening over time until one day we emerge on the other side with closure neatly folded into acceptance. Even people who know grief is messy still tend to speak about it as though it follows a direction: forward, onward, through.

But lived grief rarely feels that clean.

Lately, I’ve found myself wondering if grief behaves less like a journey and more like weather.

Not because every part of the metaphor holds perfectly. All metaphors eventually break down. But some metaphors help us articulate experiences that otherwise resist language, and this one has helped me breathe inside grief differently.

Weather is ongoing.
It changes without asking permission.
It can be beautiful and terrifying within the same afternoon.
Sometimes storms arrive suddenly. Other times we spend years watching pressure systems gather at the horizon before they finally break.

That last part especially resonates with me as someone grieving a brother lost to addiction.

When my brother Keith died almost two years ago, the grief was both shocking and strangely familiar. Families shaped by addiction often live beneath unstable emotional skies long before death arrives. Every phone call carries humidity. Every silence holds possibility. You learn to read subtle pressure changes in the atmosphere of someone you love.

And then one day the storm everyone feared finally touches ground.

What surprised me most was not simply the intensity of grief after his death, but the unpredictability of the weather that followed.

Some days, grief arrives like fog before I even recognize it. A song. A season change. A particular quality of light at dusk. Suddenly I am inhabiting memory again before I consciously understand why.

Other days, grief feels quieter, almost suspended. There are moments of sunlight now too: laughter, tenderness, old stories, even gratitude. Not because the sorrow disappeared, but because grief somehow learned to coexist beside beauty.

That coexistence matters to me.

I think one of the cruelest expectations we place on grieving people is the idea that healing means leaving grief behind. But weather does not disappear simply because we dislike it. It moves, shifts, gathers, softens, surprises, and returns.

Sometimes grief is a thunderstorm.
Sometimes it is a season of grayness.
Sometimes it becomes climate.

And honestly, some grief never fully clears.

I don’t say that hopelessly. I actually find it relieving.

Because if grief behaves more like weather than a problem to solve, then maybe we can stop judging ourselves so harshly for not “moving on” correctly. Maybe healing is not about controlling the skies. Maybe it is about learning how to live beneath changing conditions with greater tenderness toward ourselves and others.

The weather metaphor also helps me think differently about the communal nature of grief.

Weather is never experienced equally.

Some people have shelter. Some people weather storms alone. Some communities know how to gather together when disaster approaches. Others are taught to hide suffering behind closed doors. Some people inherit climates of grief long before they have words for what they are carrying.

And perhaps most importantly, weather reminds us that human beings were never meant to survive storms entirely by themselves.

I think that is part of why lament, storytelling, poetry, music, ritual, and shared remembrance matter so deeply. They become ways of helping one another endure difficult emotional climates. They do not magically fix sorrow, but they create shelter. Witness. Companionship.

Recently, while reflecting on Keith, I wrote a poem using weather as a way to speak about grief. I realized afterward that part of why the metaphor resonated so deeply is because weather allows contradiction. It makes room for dread and beauty, exhaustion and tenderness, calm and chaos, all beneath the same sky.

And perhaps that is what grieving people need most:
not simplistic answers,
not forced positivity,
not demands for closure,
but permission to inhabit changing weather honestly and together.

I don’t know if grief ever fully leaves us.
I’m not even sure it should.

After all, grief is often love enduring in altered atmosphere.

And maybe the task is not to outrun the storm, but to help weather one another through it.

~

You might like this one too: