Dear Republic,
The Republic of Letters is honored to run this piece.
-ROL
THE GRIEF HOUSE
Time doesn’t feel the same in the grief house. It seems irrelevant, an abstraction—a thing that happens somewhere else.
You look outside, and it’s fall again somehow. You can feel the damp through the glass. Everything is wet and drenched in grey. The trees are bare, their branches sharp and naked. Leaves cover the ground in decay. Flowers hang their heads.
They’re all dead.
The days of opening the door to care packages are long gone. People have to move on with their lives, don’t you know. And move on, they do.
That’s why no one comes to the grief house, though you’ve caught them looking—peeking from across the street. Just a glance here and there.
A glance and silence.
They think if they get too close to the grief house, it will close around them, trap them inside a sad moment. Grab them around the ankles when they try to leave.
Even though none of this has ever happened.
But it doesn’t matter. You’ve heard the way they talk about the grief house. They’ve decided it’s a relic. A tomb. No one is alive in there, not really. If you try to say otherwise, they’ll get mad and accuse you of something.
A car is parked in the driveway. A light shines from an upstairs room. A potted plant sits on a windowsill, its green vine stretching toward the outside world.
No one comes to the grief house. If they did, they’d see they were wrong.
There’s still life inside.
Last year, I watched my husband die. But his death wasn’t my first.
The first time it happened, I was 12 years old. My friend and I were watching TV together in her living room when her mom came home unexpectedly. She called us into the kitchen—I could tell she was going to say something bad. Before she spoke, she sucked in a deep breath. “Danielle, your parents are at the hospital. There’s something wrong with your dad.”
I stared at the floor, letting my gaze turn fuzzy. “What do you mean? What’s wrong with him?” I asked in a small voice. But she didn’t know.
Later, they told us it was cancer. One moment, my dad was playing hockey and coaching my soccer team, and the next, he couldn’t breathe. He was young and healthy, but it didn’t matter. He died less than a year later.
I couldn’t quite believe he was gone. Dads weren’t supposed to die—not when they were in their 30s. I had always been an anxious child, and my dad’s death gave me more reasons to worry. If my dad could die, who else would be taken from me? Who might be next?
My sister, Shannon. She was next.
I was asleep when it happened. I didn’t hear the knock on the door at the strange hour.
I stumbled from my bedroom to see the police standing on our doorstep. They’d already told my mom. I stood there for a moment, staring blankly. A scream cut the air. I don’t know whose it was. No, that just can’t be right, I decided, walking back to my bedroom. I felt something ripping inside, some part of me coming loose, floating off. Away from this terrible moment.
I went back to the hallway, but they were still there. Their mouths moved. Sentences came out. The words said, “We’ll take you to the hospital to see her body.”
No no no no no no no.
The front door hung open. I drifted toward it. I looked down and saw Shannon’s shoes sitting just as she’d left them. Right beside mine.
When my mom and I entered the ER through the ambulance bay, I felt all the eyes turn toward us, as if to say it’s them. We sat on a hard couch in a small room. The doctor came in and sat across from us. He had been crying.
I’ve known too much of death. I’ve had it in my face, held it in my hands. I’ve seen it fast and slow, but always long before its time.
Losing my dad in my teens, my sister in my 20s, and my husband in my 30s—I wonder, does this make me The Final Girl?
Whatever it makes me, this is a story no one wants.
People look at me and they see a nightmare—they see a life that is unimaginable, a life they openly tell me they couldn’t stand to live in. They look at me and they see the worst thing that could happen, many times over.
But they don’t see me at all.
I’m a reminder that the world isn’t a safe, fair, predictable place. I’m a reminder that being good doesn’t mean good things will come back to you.
I’m a reminder that random, senseless, horrible things can happen. That being careful isn’t always enough.
In the early days after my sister died, in that thin slice of time before everyone goes back to their lives, our house was crowded with visitors. I couldn’t distinguish the well-meaning friends from the onlookers, shouldering in to see. I was lost in the voices, in the din, in the pressure to be someone else.
When no one was looking, I’d retreat to my bedroom where I could cry without judgement.
The visitors saw this. They discussed my very normal grief as if it was a terrible monster that needed to be stopped. She just needs to get out of that house, they decided. As if they had a clue. As if the house—my home—was the source of it all. As if grief was a place that could be escaped. As if being in a crowded, noisy restaurant was the change of scenery I needed.
This might have been what they wanted, but it wasn’t what I needed. What I needed was for someone outside my grief to sit in it with me, to hold me, perhaps. To allow me to cry, to wail, to scream into a pillow. To not judge, or rush, or panic. To be a container, yes, but not to contain.
I wanted permission to grieve. And this was hard to find, I’m sorry to say.
Whether you know it’s coming or not, the death of someone very close strikes like a falling blade—it slams down, cleaving you into a before and an after. Then it takes the old you, the you from before, and scrapes it off the earth.
You bleed invisibly from somewhere deep inside. From the soul. A spiritual exsanguination. You know there’s no cure for this. There’s no escape.
People shake their heads and say, “I just can’t believe it.” Then they hand you a shovel and tell you to bury it. This pile of bodies, these losses, this grief—they think it’s a place you can leave, an emotion you can turn off, a mindset you can doff and replace with something else.
They don’t know that it travels with you.
You wander as a tourist in your own life. As no one. As a set of nesting dolls with frozen smiles and empty insides.
Occasionally, someone approaches, but they stiffen when you get too close. As if performing the accolade, they deem you Strong, Resilient, and other things that didn’t seem like choices.
You think about what this means. About what this leaves room for and what it doesn’t.
You think about what it’s like to carry this grief teetering inside like an overfilled cup—how the liquid sits just at the brim, jostling under your throat. Threatening to spill.
You think about how it’s something that can never be set down, left at home, forgotten on a side table.
You think about how it’s not really your grief that makes it hard to find your way around. It’s other people.
They won’t give you permission to grieve.
For that, you’d need to hide your grief—cover it, dress it up, make it look like something else. Then, like a Trojan horse, you could wheel yourself back into the world.
So you climb into your costume; you circle and circle, looking for an onramp. A way back in. And with each lap around the outside, you realize—with painful clarity—that no matter how compliant you are or how hidden, no matter how small you make yourself, you don’t fit into that world anymore.
Your old life is gone.
Grief is many inseparable things—the clear, bright colours of love, anger, regret, yearning, pain—rolled into a single ball of grey plasticine. Heavy in your hand.
No one else can hold your grief for you, but they can help you bear it.
I’ve realized that I didn’t need permission to grieve; I needed people who weren’t afraid of my grief. I needed to know I wasn’t all alone with it.
There’s no perfection in this new place. And there’s no room for pretending. Not anymore.
There’s just me and whoever is willing to show up and say I’m here. Let’s fumble through this together.
Danielle is a published writer and poet with a master’s degree in counselling psychology. She writes about living with grief, loss, and trauma. You can read and support her work on her page, Grief Casseroles.
Painting by Edvard Munch
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