In 2018, I lost both of my parents. Yes, both of them. Unexpectedly, and within a time frame that left our family reeling in ways that are difficult to put into words even now.

I am not a stranger to loss. I lost my grandfather and grandmother as a young adult. My little brother died from leukemia when I was a teenager. I have lost co-workers, a beloved college professor, and family pets over the years. Each loss was its own particular shape of grief, and each one taught me something I could not have learned any other way.

Here is what I know after a lifetime of navigating loss: grief never goes away completely. But it does change. It does lessen. And it has a way of resurfacing without warning, without permission, and sometimes without any obvious trigger at all.

That last part is the one nobody prepares you for. And it is the part I want to talk about today.

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The Predictable Grief and the Grief That Ambushes You

Some grief arrives predictably. On schedule. The anniversary of a death. A birthday that will now always be both a celebration and a loss. The holidays that rearrange themselves permanently after someone is no longer at the table.

These are what I call touchstone days. We see them coming. We brace for them. We make plans, consciously or not, for how we will move through them. And because we are not caught off guard, the grief feels somehow more manageable. More within our control. We are not less sad, but we are less surprised.

The grief that ambushes is different. Much different. It arrives without warning, in the middle of an ordinary moment. And it hits with a force that seems completely disproportionate to whatever triggered it. A song. A smell. A particular quality of afternoon light. The sight of someone else’s elderly parent in a grocery store aisle.

I have been caught off guard by grief more times than I can count. And I have adopted a framework for understanding why.  One that has been useful to me and to many people I have shared it with over the years.

It is the grief ball and the pain button.

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The Framework

Imagine a box. Inside the box is a ball labeled grief, and on one wall of the box is a large red button labeled pain.

When you first experience a significant loss, the grief ball is enormous. It fills the box completely. It presses against the pain button constantly. And relentlessly. The pain is all-consuming. Because the ball is everywhere, fills the box, always in contact with the button, and gives you no relief.

With time, the grief ball shrinks. It no longer fills the entire box. It no longer presses the pain button every moment of every day. You begin to feel some sort of equilibrium. A new normal. You can go hours, then days or weeks, without the pain button being activated. This is, I believe, what people mean when they say that time heals. The ball has not disappeared. It has, however, become small enough that you can move through your life without it dominating it.

Here is the part that most people do not expect: the smaller ball bounces.

As it shrinks, it becomes more mobile. More erratic. And the box that contains it can be jostled.  A familiar song, a sudden memory, the smell of someone’s cologne, a recipe, a place, a trinket, a holiday or even an unfamiliar funeral, can jostle the box. And when the box gets jostled, the ball moves. Sometimes it moves hard and fast. Sometimes it moves slow. Sometimes it even swells, albeit temporarily, back toward to a fuller size. And sometimes, without any warning at all, it hits the pain button with a force that overtakes you and takes your very breath away.

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The Funeral I Did Not Expect to Feel

A few years after my parents passed, my husband and I attended a funeral for one of his colleagues. It was someone that I had never met. I went for moral support. I had no reason to expect it would be an emotional day for me.

I was wrong.

The moment I stepped up to sign the attendance book, something shifted. My grief ball, which I thought was small and quiet, activated without warning or permission. I had to step into the hallway to compose myself. Throughout the memorial service, the pain button kept getting pushed. Repeatedly and unpredictably, as if the ball had re-inflated almost entirely and was pressing against every wall of the box.

I had not seen it coming. And that is exactly the point. The box had been jostled by the environment, maybe it was the particular sounds, the rituals, or the particular smell of grief that every funeral home shares. And the ball did what bouncing balls do in a jostled container.

It moved. It bounced. It hit its mark. And I felt it.

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Grief In The Grocery Store Aisle

When my parents passed, my husband took on some of the most difficult practical tasks, including cleaning out the kitchen. One of the tasks that affected him most deeply was clearing out their refrigerator.

He described throwing out food they had purchased but never gotten to eat. The ice cream in the freezer and groceries still waiting to be prepared struck him suddenly and completely, reminding him of the fragility of life. They had bought those things with the intention of eating them. They never got to. That small, ordinary fact broke something open in him.

Neither of us has ever looked at an elderly person in a grocery store the same way since. I find myself quietly saying a prayer for them when I pass by.

Some time later, my husband was in a store and reached for something similar to what he had thrown away from my parents’ refrigerator. He paused. Got quiet. The grief ball had again found the pain button. This time in a grocery store aisle, years after the loss, without any warning that this particular ordinary moment was going to carry that particular weight.

That is the grief ball. That is how it works.

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When the Box Gets Jostled

If you have experienced significant loss, you know exactly what I am describing. The activation is real. The surprise is real. The overwhelm is real. The disproportionate force of it is real.

Here is what I want you to know.

This is not a setback. It is not evidence that you are not healing or that something has gone wrong with your grief. It is the nature of the ball. It’s smaller now, but still present, still capable of movement, still capable of hitting its mark when the box gets shaken.

Be kind to yourself when it happens. The grief ball does not operate on your schedule or anyone else’s. It does not check with you before activating. It does not warn you that this particular song or this particular aisle or this particular afternoon is going to be one of those moments.

Be patient. Give the ball time to settle. Reach out to someone if the activation feels too large to carry alone. And if you can, in the midst of the pain, take a moment to be grateful that you had something worth grieving. That the loss is large because what you had was real.

The grief ball never fully disappears. But it does become less animated, less erratic, and less overwhelming over time. The pain button still gets pushed. It just gets pushed less often. And when it does, you become someone who knows how to give the ball time to settle and then keep going.

That is not the absence of grief. It is the presence of resilience. Resilience that is built, as it always is, in the hardest places.