Planet Grief’s Orbits

 

6/26/25

I think about grief often lately. Process-oriented as I am, maybe thinking about it is a natural reaction to feeling it.

Coming into the middle of an NPR interview, I heard the author make an analogy that resonated. Since I was driving, I couldn’t take notes, and I regret that I missed both his name and the title of his book, so I can only paraphrase what he said:

Grief is like an orbiting planet. At first, it orbits regularly, frequently, continually. As time goes on, the orbits become wider and wider, so the grief comes around less frequently. But it never stops orbiting completely.

The moon takes only 27 days to orbit the earth; Neptune takes 165 years to circle the sun.

5/8/25

These widening orbits are familiar to me from when each of my parents and my sister died. Twenty-two, 16, 14 years later, the orbits are wider now, yet occasionally the planet appears. Unlike the moon or Neptune, its revolutions are unpredictable, prompted by the unexpected.

I understand that kind of grief because it’s a response to death, and that topic is easy enough to study and analyze, in terms of resources (a quick search on Amazon brings up more than 60,000 publications with the term grief in their titles, usually associated with loss from death). The more challenging study of grief is when it’s related to loss of something other than death. *

I know that people who have lost loved ones at a young (or younger than expected) age feel a loss for all the years they thought they would still have together. I feel that too, so perhaps my grief is not very different in that regard.

10/8/24

Yet every time I visit, I am reminded that I haven’t lost him yet, and I should be grateful for whatever time we have together now. Appreciate the present. Stop grieving for what hasn’t happened yet, I tell myself. But it’s too late for that: I began grieving years ago, long before we even had a diagnosis with a name. It began the moment my denial ended. As I watch him decline, each day brings new losses to grieve.

The orbits are tight, frequent, continual. Accepting grief is easier when I understand that although the orbits don’t end, the circles become wider.

Someday, I will have to start over again, fresh.

11/28/24

(These sketch journal entries, some quite old, didn’t have enough context to write about at the time. Somehow, this post seems to give all of them context enough.)

*A couple of years ago when I was still part of a support group for caregivers of people with dementia, the moderator had recommended a book: Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief, by Pauline Boss. After reading it, I read a second book by the same author, Loving Someone Who Has Dementia: How to Find Hope while Coping with Stress and Grief. Despite their titles, which sound like they would address my experiences directly, I found both disappointing and mostly unhelpful. I suppose everyone’s mileage varies.

8/4/25