I Don’t Want to Move On

What grief feels like two years later, and why letting go still feels like betrayal.

I want to write something—anything—that will keep the cursor moving while it blinks at me like a metronome counting down to a feeling I dare not face.

The white screen glares at me, too clean, too unburdened. It offers no weight to lean against, no memory to hold.

So I begin here:

I’m writing so the grief doesn’t hit me all at once.

Because I know it will.

It always does.

It’s been two years since my grandmother passed.

Today is the day. The anniversary. But what am I supposed to do with it?

Am I to remember her, as though there has ever been a day I forgot?

Am I to summon sweet memories, though sometimes, those hurt more than the last one?

Because the end is easier to carry, it has a shape. Finality.

The last day, hazy in my memory but etched in feeling, she was unresponsive, still, her eyes fixed on the ceiling as if watching a story only she could see, as if someone had whispered the afterlife into her bones. Every word I spoke slipped past her, unheld, unnoticed.

Had she already crossed over?

Had she, at last, had enough?

Even now, as I type, I realize I am not yet ready to return to that day.

Not yet.

Perhaps it is easier to speak of her life than her leaving.

If fire and ice ever found a way to coexist in a single body, it was her.

She moved like a storm—fierce, alert, always giving, always doing.

And yet, she was unreadable.

You could know her favourite vegetable, the rhythm of her footsteps, and the way she adjusted her saree.

But you’d never know what cracked inside her when one more family member died under her care.

She had known loss far longer than she had known beginnings.

But that’s not the whole of her.

She was also the most effortlessly alive person I’ve ever met.

She laughed with her whole chest, coughing each time like the laughter was too wild for her lungs.

I do that too.

I inherited that.

I inherited more from her than I did from my mother.

She was an avid reader.

If she was lost in a book, you could shout her name twice from across the room and she wouldn’t flinch.

She stitched clothes, braided hair, wove baskets, and cooked unforgettable meals.

She fixed fuses and electric wires.

She knew which pump to unscrew and which pipe to seal.

Her hands never stopped moving.

But when she died, she looked like a finished piece of art.

As though she had ticked off every task in a cosmic to-do list.

Calm.

At peace.

And nothing in between.

Still, I believe she deserved more. A softer life. A louder one.

She was born to touch stars, but the sky she was handed was too low.

Sometimes, I wonder—

Will someone say that about me?

“She had so much potential.”

“She could have done more.”

That frightens me.

Because I want to be remembered for what I did, not for what I could have.

But that fear, of a story cut short, began with her death.

Life ends mid-sentence, whether we’re ready or not.

And that is the part I haven’t made peace with.

I don’t want to “move on.”

Not if it means forgetting.

Not if it means softening the sharp corners of memory.

We are so quick to file away our feelings. To sanitize grief like it’s an inconvenience.

But I don’t want to rush this.

I am a human being.

And a human being’s story matters only if she feels it all.

I’ve searched for solace in other people’s words.

“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal, and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again, but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same, nor would you want to.” — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

I read The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Her grief was clinical, sharp, nothing like mine. Yet I recognized the ache.

I read Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors and saw how each kind of grief wears a different face.

But literature can only ever offer a reflection, never the wound itself.

Still, I write.

Because writing is all I have, all I know.

My grandmother stitched, cooked, repaired, and tended.

I write.

Even if poorly, even if with trembling hands, I write.

“No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear,” wrote C.S. Lewis.

I don’t know what he meant.

But I know fear.

Fear of not living enough.

Of not doing enough.

Of not being enough.

What does one do with that kind of fear?

I don’t know.

Only that it’s stitched inside the grief like a second skin.

Grief fills the room up of my absent child. Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me. Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words. Remembers me of all his gracious parts. Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.

Then, have I reason to be fond of grief.

—Shakespeare

So, no. I don’t want to move on.

Because grief is the thread tying me to her.

And I’m terrified of what will remain when that thread finally wears thin.

One day, I hope I’ll meet her again in the Hereafter.

When I’m old and fragile. When I look like her.

She won’t recognize me at first.

But I’ll take her soft, wrinkled hands, just as I remember,

trace the stories folded into her creases,

touch her cheeks, still warm with memory,

and kiss her forehead

one last time.

Ciao,

Fathima