Why “Moving On” From Grief Is the Wrong Goal

When I was speaking with Meera, an introspective woman in her early thirties, something she said stayed with me for a long time after our session ended. Meera had recently lost her father. She lived in a different city, far from the home she grew up in, and hadn't been able to return immediately after his passing.

At one point in our conversation, she appeared tentative before saying, "It doesn't feel like he's gone. It just feels like he's away on a trip... like he'll walk through the door or call me any day now."

There was something deeply human about those words—something I think many people feel but don't always say aloud. When someone we love disappears from our daily life, our mind often struggles to grasp that the absence is permanent. Especially when routines continue, and their voice still echoes in our memory. We know, logically, that they're gone—but emotionally, it can feel like they're just out of sight.

I remember once, after my dog passed away, I was dishing food into her plate and only realized what I was doing after my brother asked me who it was for the third time. I said it was for Tito before I realized that she had gone. I felt embarrassed—what was I doing?

Have you ever lost someone and found yourself waiting for them to return? Perhaps, on some days, you almost sent out a text before you remembered they're gone? Have you ever thought you heard them call you, or heard "their sounds" around the time they usually got home?

It's confusing, but it holds a tender facet of the experience of grief: after we lose someone who has been woven into our life, we find ourselves living in two realities—one in which we know they are gone, one in which we still feel very close to them.

What Your Brain Is Actually Doing (It's Not Broken)

We might wonder what's wrong with us and what's making us have such expectations, but this is your brain doing exactly what it was designed to do: love deeply, map connections, and learn through lived experience.

Neuroscientist Mary-Frances O'Connor, in her groundbreaking book The Grieving Brain, explains that grief isn't just an emotional experience—it's a biological and neurological process deeply wired into our brain's architecture.

She tells us that our attachment to the people we love is not an abstract concept. When we love someone—whether a parent, partner, friend, or child—our brain creates what researchers call an "attachment map." This is like an internal GPS that helps us feel secure by tracking where our loved ones are, when they're usually around, and how emotionally close we feel to them at any given moment. We might know our partner is at work, our child is at school, or our best friend is just a phone call away. Even when they're not physically present, our brain maintains their position in our emotional landscape, making them feel "here, now, and close."

But when someone dies, these deeply ingrained patterns don't just disappear. They continue scanning for familiar cues, waiting for the usual signs of connection.

The Cruel Daily Reminders No One Talks About

This is why you might find yourself:

• Listening for their footsteps on the stairs
• Checking your phone for their messages
• Turning to share something funny, only to find space
• Feeling surprised by their absence, even months later

Only to painfully face a new reality each time you expect your loved one to be present and you register their absence. And when you do, you connect with the sadness of their loss yet again. You are reminded that they are no longer here, now, or close, and you grieve—every birthday they don't turn up for, every time you feel like telling them something about your life and you can't, even when you expect to be reprimanded by them, but there’s no one there.

Each time you register their absence, you grieve. You are learning and assimilating into your internal reality that carries their presence, the external reality of their absence.

Why Grief Literally Hurts Your Body

Mary-Frances O'Connor describes this process as a learning process, but it is a brutal one. We so easily dismiss emotional pain because it's invisible—it doesn't look like an external injury. But grief research reveals that grief activates the same brain regions responsible for physical pain.

Grief isn't merely emotional—it's genuinely physical. But there's no scar, no bandage. No one sees that tightness in your chest, the lump in your throat, the weight in your stomach, the exhaustion that seems to penetrate your bones. Because our brains process the loss of attachment as a threat to survival, the stress response it triggers affects our entire body—shifting sleep patterns, changing appetites, and weakening our immune system.

The strange thing is how invisible it is. You can be shattered and still look fine. No bruises. No cast. People expect you to keep moving, which you do, but few are privy to the pain that exists in this learning process as you move through grief.

How Love Rewrites Itself

What we know now about grief is that love doesn't simply shut off when someone dies. Our searching for them, yearning for their presence, remembering them when we see their favorite dessert or hear a funny joke, or when we feel vulnerable—this is wired into us. We cannot escape it. It's not just emotional; it's a biological response. Every time we register their absence, the ache deepens, and we learn. Our brains learn.

And this is the painfully cruel yet hopeful part of it all: over time, the brain does adapt. Slowly, painfully, it learns that they won't come back in the way you want. Instead, you start to come to terms with them, and you now exist differently—gone from the external world and preciously guarded in the internal one.

Slowly, the way in which you nurture your connection with them changes. You might choose to remember them in the stories you tell about them, in the traditions you carry, maybe the way in which you make their favorite cake, in the song that brings an ache yet fondly reminds you of them, or in the memory of the relationship that keeps shaping who you are.

This rarely happens overnight and is rarely linear. Some days you'll feel you've accepted their absence; other days, their absence will catch you off guard. Both experiences are normal parts of your brain's learning process.

Why "Moving On" Is the Wrong Goal

Looking at grief in terms of forgetting or "moving on" might be a binary way of seeing a complex experience—one that often feels inadequate, even harmful, to those who mourn. After all, how can we forget and "move on" when our lives are woven through with those we've lost?

The work of grief is not to cut those threads, but to learn how to hold them differently. It's about your brain and heart collaborating to find a new way to hold someone who's no longer physically present.

Grief isn't a problem to be solved—saying that it is would be saying that loving and connecting with people is a problem, too. Grief is an outcome of the love we have for the people in our lives. It's love finding a new way to express itself. The ache you feel isn't evidence of weakness or inability to "move on." It's proof of connection so profound that it literally changed your brain.

And while we might express that connection in newer ways, it stays alive in us. This is the paradox of grief: the present absence we come to terms with and live with.