There\u2019s a specific kind of homesickness that has nothing to do with a place. It\u2019s the quiet ache of missing the life you had before loss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s the ache for a time, and our loved ones being alive within it. The Tuesday you didn\u2019t know was the last easy Tuesday. The version of your life before the phone call, before the diagnosis, before the funeral home asked you to pick a casket or urn (that was the most surreal part for my dad and me after my mom died). You\u2019d give almost anything to go back. Not even to fix anything, just to sit in it again for five more minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I know that ache intimately. I lost my mom in December 2019 and my dad around six months later, in July 2020, both to cancer. I\u2019m an only child, so when they died, the family I grew up in of just us three and our Bichon Frise\u2014the one that made sense of who I was\u2014went with them. What was left was a version of \u201cthe old days\u201d I couldn\u2019t get back to no matter how hard I tried. And trust me, I tried. I\u2019d watch family videos, re-read their old texts, listen to voicemails, and just daydream about my childhood. I recognize how truly blessed I was to have that childhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You may recognize this feeling as yearning. An important distinction is that it\u2019s different from sadness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sadness says, \u201cThis hurts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yearning says, \u201cI want it back, specifically, the way it was.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think that\u2019s why so many of us find ourselves craving a slower, simpler time (I do, at least). Not just before our person died, but before we knew loss could do this to a life. We\u2019re not just missing a person, we\u2019re missing an entire era. The one where we still believed we had time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here\u2019s something I\u2019ve noticed, both in my own grief and in the hundreds of grievers I\u2019ve talked to since: we don\u2019t only crave the old days themselves. We crave the proof that they happened. Something we can hold. Something slower than a text message and more permanent than a story we tell ourselves that gets a little blurrier every year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I felt this hard more recently, when my cousin found a stack of letters my dad had written to my grandparents while he was in the army. Updates on his day, a line about missing home or asking them to say hello to his siblings\u2026 simple things. But for a minute, seeing those pages brought my dad back to me. His handwriting was right there in my hands. That\u2019s the thing about grief and nostalgia: they\u2019re both looking for something tangible to hold onto in a life that suddenly feels made of nothing but memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you\u2019re in the thick of missing \u201chow things used to be,\u201d I want to gently push back on the idea that this means you\u2019re stuck. Longing for the old days isn\u2019t the opposite of healing, it\u2019s often part of it. It means you\u2019re still in a relationship with what you lost. You don\u2019t have to stop wanting the old days in order to move forward in your grief. Those two things can coexist, even when it feels like they\u2019re pulling you in opposite directions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What I\u2019ve found actually helps isn\u2019t forcing yourself to \u201clet go\u201d of that craving. It\u2019s finding small, tactile ways to honor it. A ritual, a handwritten note, setting time aside to journal, a slower Sunday instead of getting caught up scrolling. Little anchors that don\u2019t replace what you lost, but remind you that you\u2019re allowed to carry pieces of the old days forward with you, even as you build something new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But what does it actually look like to carry pieces of the old days into a new life? In Part 2, I\u2019ll share the simple practices that helped me do exactly that\u2014and why slowing down became an important part of my healing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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The Ache for \u201cThe Old Days\u201d There\u2019s a specific kind of homesickness that has nothing to do with a place. It\u2019s the quiet ache of missing the life you had…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":1650,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[8,25,21,20,26,9,19],"class_list":["post-1649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-grief-series","tag-coping-with-grief","tag-grief-community","tag-grief-language","tag-grief-support","tag-loss-of-a-loved-one","tag-online-memorial","tag-support"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n