When Memory Surprises You: The Gentle Ways Grief Still Lives in Us

Sometimes grief doesn’t knock.

It just walks in through the speakers of a store, wrapped in a song you forgot you remembered. That’s what happened to me recently.

I was just buying something in Sephora when a lyric just one line sent me spinning into memory.

It wasn’t dramatic.

It didn’t flatten me.

But it did open something inside me I wasn’t expecting.

This is what I’ve learned about grief, especially as the years stretch on: it doesn’t disappear. It evolves. The deep ache that once kept me from getting out of bed has softened into something else—something quieter.

Now it shows up in moments like this: A song. A smell. The way sunlight lands on a wall. You're not “doing grief” in those moments.

You’re just being, and then suddenly you're remembering.

And remembering is a kind of love.

Sometimes it’s disorienting.

Sometimes it’s beautiful.

Sometimes, it’s both.

We don’t talk enough about the way grief follows us into the ordinary.

Not as a haunting, but as a presence.

A tenderness.

A reminder.

It doesn’t mean we’re broken or stuck.

It means we’ve loved deeply—and that love still echoes through our lives in ways we can’t always predict.

So, if a song catches you off guard…

If you find yourself crying in a grocery store,

Or standing still in a memory while the world moves around you—

Let it be okay.

Let it be sacred.

Grief isn’t a straight line.

It's a love story that keeps unfolding.

walking along the beach; remembering a loved one

A Reflection: Echoes of You

I didn’t go looking for you today.

I was just…

in Sephora.

Buying something small, something forgettable.

And then a voice over the speakers, floating above the hum of air conditioning and quiet decisions. You have the most wonderful blue eyes I’ve ever seen.

And there you were.

The world didn’t stop.

But I did.

Not with sadness, not the kind that crushes just a gentle breaking open.

Like something inside me bowed its head in your direction.

I paid quickly.

Stepped out into the stillness of early evening.

Not devastated.

Just quiet.

A little undone.

A little more alive.

It’s not like the early days, when grief wrapped around my ankles and made it hard to walk. Now, it comes like this unexpected, tender, honest.

You arrive through songs, through the sky, through silence that doesn’t ask anything of me.

And in moments like this, I remember:

Love doesn’t vanish.

It shape-shifts.

It echoes.

It sings.

I carry you—not with the heaviness of sorrow, but with the breath of something that once lit me up from the inside and still, somehow, does.