How Grief Can Be Like Childbirth

A Personal Perspective: The early pain is unbearable but your brain protects you from the memory.

Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

Key points

• Early grief is pain like you've never experienced.
• You never get over grief but it changes from anguish to melancholy.
• Once grief has started to mellow, it might be hard to remember what that early grief felt like.

My brother Oliver died of a drug overdose in the 1980s. As my parents rode a taxi home from the morgue, they learned that their taxi driver had also lost a son, years prior.

“Does the pain get any better?” my parents wanted to know.

“It gets different,” the driver said. "It gets bearable."

That has been my go-to anecdote for sympathy notes since then because I found it to be true for myself. But since losing my husband in 2020—a loss that for me has been even more wrenching than losing Oliver—I have come to understand “different” more deeply.

Pain amnesia

I have never given birth but have heard it said many times that as awful as labor is, when it’s over and your newborn is placed in your arms, you forget. (Otherwise, I’ve also heard say, women would be one-and-done mothers.)

That’s how I feel now about the earliest days of grief. I know that the emotional pain was like nothing I’ve ever felt before, and I can conjure in my mind’s eye vignettes of myself falling to my knees by my bed and sobbing. The other day, a Facebook memory popped up from just four months after Tom’s sudden death in which I just wrote I miss him over and over and over. And while I could just as easily post that today, four years later, because I miss him as much as ever, I know that the agony propelling my fingers then was far more raw than the melancholy I feel today.

In a way, that’s hard to admit because it sounds like I’m “getting over it” when I’m not. You don’t get over grief. It’s not a cold or flu. I will grieve Tom forever. I will miss him forever. I will probably even cry forever, although not the way I did the first couple of years.

Grief bursts

I find it impossible to access what the pain of that first year felt like except sometimes in short bursts. Sometimes, as I’m going about my day, the loss pierces me like a knife to the heart. It happened the other day, when I was standing in line at the supermarket behind an older couple doing their grocery shopping together. While they waited without talking, the woman casually and briefly rubbed her husband’s back. She had a moment of love for him that needed expressing. That small gesture just about did me in. I felt it in my gut and had to fight tears.

But after a few minutes, the anguish passed, leaving only a shadow of sorrow, a grief hangover.

Grief doesn’t go away, and you don’t get over it, but it mellows. I miss Tom every hour of every day. I am free of thoughts of him for only minutes at a time—never hours or days. I talk to him frequently. I still have a hard time parting with his possessions. But I no longer must sleep with the light on, as I did for months after his death. I no longer wake in tears every morning. I can walk the aisles of Costco and stay dry-eyed. I still cry in the car, but not as often. And tears, when they hit, come on quickly and end quickly.

A promise for the future

This misery amnesia is a good thing; it is our brain protecting us from reliving the worst emotional pain that we as humans face.

But just as I can’t remember what it felt like to have my heart bleeding in my chest, I can’t explain to people who have recently lost someone what grief feels like now. Back in my early days, people told me it would get easier, but that was impossible to imagine. How could I ever feel any better if he’s never coming back? To some extent, I still feel that way. The only way I could ever feel truly whole again is if he magically walked through the door. And yeah, I still fantasize about that happening, or of waking up and realizing it’s just been a horrible dream.

But trust me, if you are in the falling-to-your-knees-and-sobbing stage: You are in the belly of the beast. The very worst of it. Sob all you must and trust that time will do its thing. You couldn't stop it even if you wanted to (and believe it or not, healing can feel disloyal). Grief doesn’t get better. But it does get different. It gets bearable.