Grief comes like rain without warning,
heavy with foreboding
It drums against the roof of the heart.
It sits beside you in silence,
It wears the face of absence,
Speaks in echoes of what was lost.
It makes mornings harder to rise into,
It makes laughter feel borrowed,
It makes time move with wounded feet.
Some days it is a tide,
pulling you under
With the weight of a name
you still whisper.
But grief is not stronger
than the soul that carries it.
It may bend you
like a tree in hurricane winds,
strip leaves from your certainty,
leave branches bare against cold seasons
But roots know how to hold on.
It carves deeper chambers in the heart,
teaches tenderness to pain,
turns innocence into wisdom.
It may slow you down,
make healing come in fragments,
in breaths,
in surviving one dusk at a time.
Still, slow is not broken.
And even when grief breaks parts of you,
shatters old versions of who you were,
it does not erase your worth.
No sorrow can cancel
the sacredness of your becoming.
Grief may change you.
Yes.
You are still the dawn
waiting past the longest night.
Still the seed
carrying spring beneath hard soil.
Still a song unfinished.
The future has not abandoned you.
It waits, patient as sunrise
for your trembling hands to reach for it.
One day,
the ache will soften into memory,
memory into meaning,
and meaning into strength
You did not know survived.
And you will understand:
Grief was a river you crossed,
not a grave you lived in.
You were never meant
to drown in mourning
only to pass through it,
carrying love forward.
Grief can feel endless,
but even endless-feeling nights
make room for morning.
And you,
wounded, changed, still rising
are greater
than the sorrow that tried to name you.
© By Ngozi Ebubedike.
