You were fine at the funeral. Fine on the anniversary. Composed, functional, upright. And then a supermarket plays their song next to the frozen peas and you're wrecked in aisle nine, and the person you were shopping with is staring.
These are grief ambushes, and the unfairness of them is the point: grief doesn't check the calendar. It waits in sense-memory - a song, a smell of cut grass, someone with their walk crossing a street - and detonates on contact. The hard dates you braced for pass quietly; the random Tuesday takes you out. It means nothing except that they're woven through everything, which you already knew.
In the four minutes the wave owns you
- Stop pretending it isn't happening - the fight is worse than the wave
- Feet on the floor, one slow breath out, longer than the breath in
- Name it, silently or out loud: "this is grief, it's a wave, it passes"
- Leave if you want. Abandoned baskets are allowed. So is crying by the peas
Waves pass. That's the one reliable thing about them. And in a strange way you may come to half-welcome them - proof, on an ordinary day, that they're still everywhere in you.