Sunday Porch Converstations: The Grief That Doesn’t Close

The stages were a description. They were never a staircase.

There are two chairs on this porch. There have always been two chairs. I sit in the same one every morning — you learn things like that about yourself in the early light — and this morning, for no reason I could name, I looked over at the other one and my chest did that thing. You know the thing. The small interior stumble when a loss you thought you had “processed” taps you on the shoulder like no time has passed at all.

It’s late July. The heat has been unbroken for six weeks. And I want to talk about the grief that behaves the same way.

Somewhere along the way, somebody sold us the idea
that grief is a project with a completion date.

Five stages, worked through in order, and at the end you receive a certificate called closure. Here’s what they didn’t tell you: those famous stages were written to describe people who were dying — not the people who have to keep living. They were a description of what grief can look like. They were never a staircase you were required to climb. There is no floor at the top where the missing stops.

And here’s my confession, because I don’t get to skip my chapter: I tried to graduate from grief. I treated closure like an assignment, and I am a woman who completes her assignments. I read the books. I did the work — and hear me, the work is real and it matters. But every time the grief circled back — a smell, a song, an empty chair on an ordinary Tuesday — I quietly marked myself down. Still not over it. Failing grief. Early in my career, God forgive me, I think I passed a version of that timeline on to people who trusted me with their pain. The clock I was holding over my own heart, I sometimes held over theirs.

So let me say now what I wish someone had said to me:

You are not failing grief.
Closure was never the assignment.
Carrying it was.

Some griefs don’t close because some loves don’t end. The missing is not a malfunction. It is the nervous system’s long memory of an attachment that mattered — and a body that loved somebody that thoroughly is not broken. It’s faithful.

· · ·

Now here is the turn, and I need you to stay for it, because this is the part nobody puts on the sympathy cards:

The people who carry grief well become the ones who can sit with anyone. Have you noticed this? The friend who can hear your worst news without flinching, without fixing, without changing the subject — ask them sometime. Almost every one of them is carrying something that didn’t close. Grief carried well doesn’t shrink a person. It hollows them the way a canyon is hollowed — by something that kept flowing — and the hollowing is what makes room for other people’s pain to be received instead of deflected.

I have laughed hard on this porch, in the same chair where my chest still stumbles. Both are true. The grief didn’t close, and the joy came anyway, and they have learned to sit out here together like old neighbors. That’s not healing failing. That is what healing actually looks like — not the missing ending, but the missing no longer being the only thing that’s true.

The chair is still empty.
The porch is still full.

The heat won’t break for weeks yet, and I’ve stopped asking it to. Some things you don’t get over. You get bigger. The grief stays the same size, and the life around it grows.

If you’re carrying one of the griefs that doesn’t close — you’re not behind. You’re not doing it wrong. You’re doing something braver than closure. You’re staying faithful to a love with your whole nervous system, and building a life around it anyway.

There’s a chair here for you. We don’t rush grief on this porch.

With warmth from the porch,

Kristi

❦

About the Author

Kristi M. Estrada, LPC-S, NCC, SEP, is a licensed professional counselor-supervisor and somatic trauma therapist in Phoenix, Arizona, founder of Kristi Estrada, LPC-S, SEP & Associates, and the creator of Trauma Restorative Care™. Known to many as The Healing Servant, she writes at the intersection of nervous system science, attachment repair, and a faith that has been through the fire and walks with a limp — held deeply, never handed to the reader as a requirement. There’s a seat on this porch whether you pray or not. Kristi’s writing is shaped as much by what she has survived as by what she has studied, which is why she doesn’t offer tidy answers — she’s never been healed by one. Her Sunday Porch Conversations reach clients, clinicians, and everyday readers who are tired of tidy answers and ready for true ones. Learn more at healingservant.com.