Over the next week while we cleaned out her apartment, we found evidence of opioid and benzodiazepine abuse. During the week after Mom died, Morgan and I planned the entire funeral, wrote an obituary, wrote and gave a eulogy, identified our mom’s body at a crematorium, cleaned out her entire apartment, and suddenly took on roles as detectives as we uncovered the secrets of my mom’s addiction to pills that we didn’t know about while she was alive. The more we uncovered, the more questions we had. In the weeks and months to come, I became obsessed with finding out answers and became stuck in the “investigative” stage of grief.

To heal, we have to feel the pain. An easy sentence to write but an incredibly hard one to live. Real healing requires work. It takes effort to feel pain. It’s easy to disconnect and suffer alone. What’s difficult is picking up the phone for the third day in a row and saying, “I’m still not okay.”

But, if you’re like me, the question you’re asking yourself right now is how do I “feel my pain?”

Although it feels like people have forgotten or that they don’t care, I have realized they probably don't know what to say. Most people my age haven’t lost a parent, let alone two. But it’s also hard to know what to say even if you have lost parents or experienced any other painful loss. Grief is so unique in this way. No one knows exactly how you feel. Here’s a secret: there is no right thing to say, and saying something is always better than saying nothing.

The secondary losses you experience in grief are painful and real. They are often the part of grief that hits you when you least expect it. Grieving my parents makes sense. Grieving them as grandparents always takes me by surprise.

Grief is complex and confusing. It is a shared experience that is at the same time distinctly unique. There’s no right or wrong way to navigate it. It’s universal and personal. There is no handbook, no roadmap, no instruction manual. That fact is equally beautiful and frustrating.