My Aria of Grief

I think, for me, it’s been both: horrible despair and agony, and something soul-shatteringly beautiful.

People love to quote that line about it being “better to have loved and lost than never loved at all.” Maybe sometimes that’s true. Maybe from a distance it sounds wise, noble, poetic. But right now, from where I’m standing, I can say this with absolute certainty:

It sucks to love and lose.

It really does.

And what makes it even more agonizing is the feeling that I was the one who destroyed everything—that somehow I was the ultimate cause of the loss. We didn’t break because of betrayal, hatred, lies, or deceit. There was no dramatic villain, no slammed doors, no final explosion. It was amicable. Civil. Mature, even. It was just... time, I guess.

And somehow that almost hurts more.

Because when something ends in flames, at least you can point to the fire. You can blame the wreckage. But when something ends quietly, kindly, reasonably, there’s nowhere for the grief to land. It just circles back to you.

Now time is doing the opposite of what everyone promises. Instead of healing, it’s making the cuts feel deeper. The grief feels beyond comprehension, especially now—at this stage of life, where I’m not only mourning love, but also lamenting youth, possibility, and the strange shock of realizing middle age has arrived while I was busy being alive.

Loss has a way of piling itself together.

I think it would help to have a group of friends who could interrupt the pain for even an hour. Not fix it—just distract it. Dilute it. But there’s no one here to stop the hurt besides me, and no one else but me to deal with it. That loneliness adds its own weight.

So what do I do?

Do I keep journaling until the pages run out? Compose a sad aria no one will hear? Or should more drastic measures be taken—reinvention, escape, movement, some radical change of scenery?

I don’t want these feelings.

I don’t know how to process this grief, nor do I know if I’m even supposed to understand it. Do I drag it all into therapy again and complain about the same wound? Or do I just wait for the answers that never come?

Maybe that’s the hidden cruelty of grief: it asks questions no one can answer. Or maybe there are no answers, and that’s the point.

I sound so typical, I think. Another middle-aged person grieving old love, circling the same wound, asking the same impossible questions people have asked forever. But I don’t feel typical. To me this pain feels singular, custom-made, humiliatingly personal. It doesn’t feel like a cliché when it wakes you up at night. It doesn’t feel ordinary when it follows you into grocery stores, traffic lights, songs, empty rooms, birthdays, mirror reflections.

It’s been decades.

End it.

End what? The obsession. The ache. The private trial. End the way it still reaches across time like it owns space in my chest.

Grief is a ruthless prosecutor. It presents selective evidence—my failures, the things I mishandled, the love I took for granted—and calls it truth.

I don’t want to be in this season. I want to leave.

Change. Escape. Reinvent. Disappear into a new city, a new face, a new life, a new version of myself untouched by old ghosts. But that’s the trick, isn’t it? You keep escaping what you can’t escape. You can leave towns, jobs, apartments, lovers, habits, identities. You can’t outrun what traveled inside you the whole time.

I have no faith in a god. Maybe if I did, things would be different. Maybe I could place all this sorrow in divine hands. But before believing in that, maybe I should believe in myself.

And there’s the harder religion.

How can I believe in myself when I’ve carried this for so many years? How do I trust the person who still kneels before an altar of memory? How do I admire the man who keeps reopening a closed door with his bare hands?

There is a voice that calls this pathetic. It is eager, efficient, and cruel.

Move on, Jerry.

Move on.

As if moving on were a switch. As if the heart obeyed deadlines. As if grief were laziness.

But I am realizing that moving on doesn’t mean erasing it. It means carrying it differently. Maybe it means refusing to turn regret into identity. Maybe it means accepting that some losses never fully leave, but also never fully define you.

I’ve seen what remains, and it is horrifying, dark, and torturous. It stalks me in my dreams. I dream of some nameless terror chasing me, and it catches me every time. I wake up sweating, shaking, heart racing.

But the “endgame” isn’t outrunning the terror. Maybe it’s just realizing that I’m still awake.

I need to give myself some credit. I have moved on more than I let on. Not in the dramatic, cinematic way—no grand rebirth, no sunrise montage—but in increments.

I kept living. I kept working. I kept making things. I laughed on days I thought laughter had left for good. I survived years I once believed would break me. I learned how to function with ache stitched into the lining.

That counts.

I have been unfair to myself because I mistook remembering for failing. I assumed pain meant no progress. I believed that if grief still visited, then I must still be standing in the same place.

But I am not in the same place.

I am older. Wiser in some ways, softer in others. More scarred, yes—but also more aware of what matters. Movement is not always visible. Sometimes growth looks like endurance. Sometimes healing looks like carrying something better.

I used to think that by dredging up all these feelings, I’d come off as a man stuck in the past. But I’m not. I’m learning from it. To write about this pain is stirring the pot, and of course it’s going to be intense. But I’m finally dealing with it.

I don’t think grieving has an end. I think it decrescendos.

And hopefully, I will walk with my head up and my heart ready again.

Finally.

Less punishment. Less fear. Less staring backward.

Just movement.

Just today.

Just forward.