When Grief Comes
By: cb_grl
Dedicated to the friend we lost too soon to long covid and to the long covid warriors who remain behind to fight.
Grief is like an old familiar who comes to stay. Not a friend, but an unwelcome companion on your journey. Grief colors your thoughts…your ability to be present. It alters your perception of the world. It erases all sense of time passing.
You wonder to yourself…how am I able to still breathe? How can this world possibly keep spinning? How can all the color, laughter, and joy just vanish, and the world is awashed in shades of grey. The space around you feels so terribly empty and cold, and you think I will never know what it means to feel warm again. The idea that you could find something to smile about spontaneously seems as far as the east is from the west.
Suddenly grief becomes that companion that lives with you until that day when weeks, months, or perhaps years from now when you realize you could feel something again. To feel something other than the aching abyss of the emptiness of the loss, the absence of who is no longer here. That day is but a distant thought and wistful dream.
Grief is its own timekeeper. It keeps its own measure of days. Grief is a journey that is traversed in your own timing and on your own terms. It takes as long as it takes. When it fades, the journey feels complete, and color, laughter and joy have returned to your world.
Grief recedes into the shadows, waiting for the day when it comes again.
And in long covid land, grief will come again.
Published: December 2025
