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.

People also say, “You never get over it, but you learn to move on.” We move on out of necessity, because the world doesn’t stop when a person dies. Everyone else, everything else, continues regardless of your pain.

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.