Where She Still Lives.

The other day at a family gathering, I asked my cousin’s boyfriend how he was doing. His answer caught me off guard with its quiet honesty. He’d just come through a heavy part of the year—an emotional rollercoaster he can’t seem to avoid.

For him, the end of June and the month of July aren’t just sunny California days—they’re a season of remembering. Around this time five years ago, he unexpectedly lost his mother, to whom he was very close. This stretch of time also holds her birthday, her wedding anniversary with his father, and other deeply personal milestones.

Summertime, for him, carries a weight most people around him can’t see. It’s not just grief—it’s memory, love, longing, and everything in between.

As he spoke, I felt an unspoken recognition settle between us. I knew what he meant by a “rough month.” Those special dates—birthdays, anniversaries, the day someone left—they have a way of creeping up on you. Even when your mind forgets, your body remembers. There’s a subtle heaviness to those days, like something tugging at you from the inside. You might feel more irritable, more sensitive, or just vaguely off. The world keeps moving, but something in you has shifted—tilted by absence and stirred by memory. And even if no one else sees it, you feel it in your bones.

We move so quickly through our lives that we rarely stop to trace the source of that sudden unease. But grief has its own calendar. It doesn’t ask for permission. It doesn’t follow logic. It just shows up—suddenly, and always right on time.

That’s something I’m still learning to accept: to stop resisting it, to stop rushing it away. I’m learning to give it space. Because sometimes, the most honest thing we can do is let ourselves feel it.

Through conversations like his, and through my own experience with grief, I’m beginning to understand something people don’t always say out loud: time doesn’t necessarily soften the blow. It doesn’t erase the loss or dull the ache completely. What time offers is space—space to breathe, to move through the days, to learn how to carry the loss a little differently.

The sun does come back. The birds sing again. Life regains its color. And you do learn how to live again, even if everything feels a little changed.

But you don’t stop missing them. You don’t forget. The finality of their absence never fully fades. Some mornings, even years later, it still feels fresh. And that’s okay. Maybe it’s the body’s way of keeping them close. Maybe it’s because love—real love—doesn’t end with death.

It lingers. It lives on.

Love, unlike life, doesn’t know how to let go.