The World Has a Very Low Tolerance for Your Grief

The world has a very low tolerance for your grief.

It wants you to be sad for a respectable amount of time, then return to yourself. It sends flowers that die on your counter. It says he’s in a better place and everything happens for a reason and means: please stop making me feel this with you.

My son Ronan died at three years old. In May, it will be fifteen years.

Fifteen years. He has been gone five times longer than he was alive.

The world decided a long time ago that I should be over this by now. And I will tell you honestly — the sharp edges do soften. I won’t lie to you about that. The 3am wake-ups become less constant. But sometimes I am standing at a party and I still want to crawl out of my skin, and I have learned that this is not a setback. It is not a sign that something is wrong with me. It is love. It is Ronan. It is the cost of having been his mother, which I would pay a thousand times over.

Soft is not the same as gone, and changed is not the same as healed.

Grief doesn’t heal. It deepens into something you learn to carry. And in 2022, the American Psychiatric Association added Prolonged Grief Disorder to the DSM — which means if you are still grieving past their timeline, you now have a diagnosis. They pathologized love. They looked at the people who refused to stop feeling and decided the feeling was the problem.

I want you to know that I reject that with every cell in my body.

Grief is not a disorder. It is love with nowhere to go.

A few weeks after Ronan died, I walked into a bookstore. I ran my fingers along every spine in the self-help aisle looking for something — anything — that would tell me the truth about what I was living. Not a guide. Not five stages. Not a gentle reassurance that time heals all wounds.

Just someone who had been where I was and was willing to say so out loud, without softening it, without wrapping it in the kind of hope that feels like a lie when your child has just died and the world keeps moving like nothing happened.

I needed someone to say: this is unsurvivable, and you are going to survive it anyway, and it is going to be the hardest thing you ever do, and you are not alone in it.

There was nothing. The shelves had nothing for me.

Do you know what I bought? The Emperor of All Maladies — a history of cancer — because it was the closest thing I could find to something that understood the world I had just been destroyed by. I brought it home and opened it and the words swam.

I couldn’t read. I who had always read, who had always written, who had always found my way back to language — I had lost the ability to hold a sentence in my mind. That book sat on my nightstand like an indictment. This was all the world had to offer me.

So I wrote it myself. Or I tried.

For a decade I tried. I wrote and threw it away. I wrote and hid it. I wrote and threw up. I wrote through the self-doubt and the grief and the hatred of my own voice, then closed the laptop and didn’t open it again for months.

I started over more times than I can count. I threw away pages that cost me everything to write. I buried drafts I was too afraid to look at.

And then, always, something brought me back. Ronan brought me back. Because this is the thing about writing from the deepest, most unspeakable place you have ever been — you cannot abandon it for long. It will not let you. It knows it matters more than your fear does.

My pain needed a purpose. This book is that purpose.

Over a decade of writing in the dark — in his Star Wars bed at midnight, in Iceland at 2am after scattering his ashes in the rain, in the slow, quiet dissolving of a marriage that grief took apart. Not in anger, not in cruelty, but the way a tide takes sand — so gradually you almost don’t notice until it’s gone. In a life I had to rebuild from nothing I recognized.

It is for everyone who has ever been handed a platitude when they needed the truth. Who has been told to find peace when what they actually needed was permission to feel everything, forever, without apology. Who has stood in a bookstore, or a hospital corridor, or a kitchen full of dying flowers, and felt completely, devastatingly alone — and wondered if anyone else in the world was feeling exactly this.

People like us have always existed.

We have always been the ones standing at the edge of parties wanting to disappear. The ones who learned to say “I’m fine” in the exact tone that makes people stop asking. The ones who wake up on ordinary Tuesdays and feel it like it was yesterday, and have learned to carry that quietly because the world made very clear, very early, that it did not have room for the size of what we feel.

We have always been here. We just couldn’t find each other.

This book is my attempt to find you. To walk back into that bookstore and put something on the shelf that tells the truth — that your grief is not a disorder, not a phase, not an overstay. That the people who couldn’t hold it with you were just too small for it. Not you. Never you.

Your grief is not too much. The world’s tolerance for it is just too small.

Almost fifteen years without my son. I still feel everything. That is not a problem to be solved. That is love and nobody is ever going to take that away from me.

My grief is my invisible string to my child. 🖤