you seem pretty happy for a girl in grief

this is me trying.

photo on unsplash by max berger

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there is something strangely fascinating about the assumptions people make. over the past few years, this idea has surfaced through countless conversations — some with relatives, others with friends whose faces have blurred with time. their words, however, remain remarkably vivid.

“you must be so happy. you can afford those expensive k-pop concert tickets.” “you travel so often. even by executive-class train!” “remote work? the salary must be amazing.” “you’re able to give generous eid gifts and angpao now.” “you’ve gained weight. you look healthier now.” “it’s wonderful that you’ve become financially independent after your father passed away. you can work from anywhere, even watch movies while working.”

it’s almost scientific, isn’t it?

we collect data, recognize patterns, and reach conclusions. but our observations are almost always incomplete.

the paradox is that the most decisive parts of a person’s life are often the least visible. sometimes, human beings are unreliable observers.

perhaps they’re right. in many ways, i am happy. or rather, i am profoundly grateful.

grateful beyond language for every form of abundance entrusted to me, for the privilege of safety, for meaningful work, for health that still allows me to wake each morning, and for every unexpected provision that arrives with impeccable timing. yet gratitude and grief have never been opposites. that, perhaps, is one of life’s quiet paradoxes.

the funny thing is, people only ever see the visible chapters. they never see the hormonal breakouts that quietly covered my face for months. they never see the circular patches where my hair simply stopped growing, as stress introduced me to alopecia in the most unceremonious way. small, silent islands scattered across my scalp — as though grief had found another language after tears had grown too ordinary.

i never tell them. simply because some battles lose their dignity when constantly explained. life has taught me that not every wound asks to become a conversation. sometimes it merely asks for a little privacy.

grief is untidy.

some mornings begin with remarkable strength. others unravel because of a song in a café, a familiar perfume drifting through a crowd, an empty seat at the dinner table, or a memory that arrives without knocking.

grief possesses an almost uncanny sense of timing.

it finds us in the middle of perfectly ordinary moments. standing in the supermarket. laughing with friends. watching a film. waiting for the train. there is no appointment. no warning. no logic. it simply returns.

people often imagine grief as a destination — as though one day it quietly packs its belongings, waves goodbye, and leaves forever. it doesn’t.

grief behaves more like the ocean.

its tides are never ours to command.

some days the water barely reaches our ankles. on others, it rises without permission until breathing itself feels like work. healing, then, is not learning how to stop the waves. it is learning that we can survive another tide. and another. and another.

if i were asked to describe grief with complete honesty, i would say this:

witnessing someone’s death feels, in a peculiar way, like dying alongside them. only the funeral belongs to one person. the other continues walking. something within survives, yet something else quietly disappears forever.

the difficult part is that it often takes years before we discover exactly what was buried.

grief, after all, is an enigma. a riddle whose answer keeps changing as we ourselves continue changing.

looking back, my life no longer unfolds as one continuous story. it resembles two volumes shelved beside each other: the life before my father passed away, and everything that has been written since.

for nearly five years, life has often felt like standing aboard a small ship drifting across an immeasurable sea. no anchor. no familiar harbor. no father waiting at the shore. only the frequent observations collected inside this vast laboratory of life — where resilience is rarely taught through books, but through ordinary tuesdays, overdue bills, silent birthdays, difficult decisions, and countless moments of carrying on simply because morning arrived again.

losing a father alters something fundamental within a daughter. not merely her circumstances. her compass. there are directions only fathers unknowingly provide, and when that compass disappears, adulthood becomes less a straight road than a maze — one navigated through instinct, prayer, mistakes, and small acts of courage repeated until they resemble confidence.

if there is anything i have learned to be quietly proud of, it is not that i survived perfectly.

it is that i continued sailing while still searching for the stars.

perhaps that is why i rarely let people witness my hardest days. because sometimes i fear that sadness has a peculiar gravity. i worry it might settle inside someone else’s heart when it has already occupied mine long enough. so i smile. i work. i travel. i laugh. i buy concert tickets. i give gifts during eid mubarak. i continue living. not because grief has disappeared. but because living is the only conversation i have left with the people i love.

so if someone who has recently lost a parent seems happy, please resist the temptation to question it.

joy is not evidence that grief has ended.

more often than not, it is evidence that they are trying — very gently — to survive. the world sometimes mistakes visible happiness for the absence of sorrow. but the human heart has always been more holistic than that. it is entirely capable of carrying delight in one hand and devastation in the other. that is not contradiction. that is simply what love looks like after loss.

there is a common hope that one day grief will disappear completely. i no longer believe that. grief does not leave. it changes shape. over time, it becomes less like an enemy and more like an old companion who sits quietly beside us, asking for nothing except acknowledgment. acceptance, then, is not forgetting. it is making room. making room for absence without allowing it to erase presence. making room for sorrow without exiling joy. making room for memories that ache, while still welcoming the serendipity of new ones. perhaps there is no final lesson to this puzzle.

only this realization: the deepest loves inevitably leave the deepest grief. and maybe that has always been the price of having loved someone enough that their absence continues to reshape the architecture of our lives.

to everyone learning to live beside a loss that never truly leaves — may we continue finding moments of solace. may we continue discovering reasons to laugh without guilt. and may we never mistake someone else’s smile for the whole story. because some of the happiest-looking people are, quietly, still learning how to carry an ocean.

— Adha❤

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