My brother passed away more than 20 years ago. I still remember our last phone call—we disagreed, as we often did. It was a usual Sunday evening chat. He lived in the US, and I was in India. He felt I could be giving our parents in Bangalore more attention. Easy for him to say, I remember thinking—and so my last words were: why don’t you come back and stay in Bangalore then? The next morning, my sister-in-law called to say he had passed.
This was my first deep lesson in living with grief. Not the tidy stages I had read about, but a strange suspension of time. Life outside carried on, but inside, everything slowed to a halt. The clock ticked, yet the heart refused to move forward.
The hidden face of grief
In Time Lived, Without Its Flow, poet Denise Riley captures this altered state with startling precision. After the sudden death of her son, she writes of how “time had been pulled from under me.” Days no longer passed in sequence; they thickened, stalled, and repeated.
I saw this with my parents. My mother was devastated—he had been her favourite. My father aged in ways noticeable only to me—his walk slower, his eyes lingering, often moist, over pictures of the last October he spent with my brother and his family, surrounded by the colours of fall in America. He stoically remained my mother’s pillar of strength.
For me, I recognised and grappled with loneliness for the first time: the one person who shared my childhood was no longer there. No one to call and crib about life. No one who cared about the books I picked up from a second-hand store. No one in my corner when I needed it most. The paradox—that the clock ticks but the heart remains unmoved—is at the core of grief and time.
Grief is not only absence. It is presence—painful, persistent, but holy.
Why grief doesn’t follow stages
Like many, I expected grief to follow stages—shock, denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance—the five familiar steps popularised by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. But lived grief rarely unfolds so neatly. Riley insists that grief is not a “stage” but an altered experience of time itself—and I can only agree.
In deep loss, especially when sudden, coping with loss does not move forward in sequence. A day can last forever. A month can pass without movement. The world rushes ahead, but the grieving remain rooted in place, caught in a loop where absence dominates every hour.
The psychology of waiting
Psychologist Pauline Boss gives a name to this condition: ambiguous loss. It is the kind of grief that has no closure. A loved one is absent but not confirmed dead. A body is missing. A goodbye never said.
Ambiguous loss keeps grief alive indefinitely. Unlike death, which, however painful, allows rituals of closure, ambiguous loss holds the grieving in limbo. They are forced to live two realities at once: believing and disbelieving, hoping and despairing.
This is the condition of Riley in her ruptured time, and of families in war zones and disaster zones. They live in a perpetual maybe. Their grief cannot heal because it cannot be completed.
Life in the long vigil
What does life look like in this suspended grief? It looks like a ritual.
My parents repeated their daily acts not because they believed they would bring their son back, but because they were all they had left. Many grieving people do the same. They keep clothes unwashed, beds unmade, chairs untouched. They return to old text messages or voice recordings. They light candles each evening. These acts do not change reality, but they preserve connection.
Living in grief’s vigil is exhausting. Yet it is also a form of love. It is a refusal to let go, a stubborn keeping-alive of the beloved.
When waiting becomes prayer
There is a strange spirituality in waiting. In grief, waiting often becomes a kind of prayer.
In Hindu tradition, the rituals of shraddha keep alive the bond with ancestors, acknowledging that absence is never emptiness. In Christian faith, vigils are kept for the departed, holding their presence through candlelight and prayer. In Sufi poetry, waiting for the Beloved is the very essence of devotion.
Perhaps grief’s vigil is not only pain but also devotion. To wait is to love, fiercely and faithfully, even when the world demands closure.
The wisdom of letting go
Here, I found solace in the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. It reminds us that no one is exempt from loss, but loss itself is held within a greater understanding of our nature and the nature of all things: they change, they pass. To cling is to suffer. To let go is to know freedom.
The dissolving of what we depend upon leaves behind a space, and in that very space, we discover our own inner wholeness. In the hole that a loved one leaves, something deeper shines through: ungraspable spaciousness and a love that was always present.
Paradoxically, when someone I know dies, I often feel them even closer. While I cannot create new memories or hear their voice again, their love remains as strong as before—sometimes even stronger. Because in the end, all that remains is the love that was shared. Nothing more, and nothing less.
This perspective did not erase my grief, but it softened its edges. It allowed me to see that loss is not only rupture but also revelation.
To wait is to live in a house of silence where every sound is an echo of the absent one.
To remain in the endless present is to declare that love is stronger than time itself.
Coping with grief without closure
Yet we cannot romanticise this vigil. Waiting without end can wear down both body and spirit. The question, then, is: How do we live with grief when time refuses to move?
Some possibilities:
- Naming the grief: to admit we are suspended is to release ourselves from the pressure to “move on.”
- Creating rituals: such as lighting a candle, keeping a diary, or visiting a place, all help give shape to formless waiting.
- Community support: grief shared is grief lightened; in groups, vigils become bearable.
- Creative expression: as Riley shows, writing itself can be a way of re-marking time, of inscribing meaning onto suspended days.
Coping with loss may never mean resolution. But it can be carried with gentleness, through ritual, art, and solidarity.
Grief as love’s most faithful form
Ultimately, grief is not solely about the past, nor is it resolved in the future. It is a present that stretches, sometimes unbearably, sometimes tenderly.
Perhaps this is grief’s paradox: it is agony, but it is also love’s most faithful form. To remain in the endless present is to declare that love is stronger than time itself. It is the invisible guest who alters every clock in the house. Days drag, nights repeat, and yet in that very stillness, love continues to breathe.
To wait is to live in a house of silence where every sound is an echo of the absent one. To grieve, as Riley writes, is to live “without the flow of time,” caught in a moment that refuses to pass.
While we may never resolve this, I think that in our vigil, we hold something sacred: the certainty that what we have lost is too precious to vanish, too loved to be forgotten. Grief, then, is not only absence. It is presence—painful, persistent, but holy.
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