This too shall pass, they say,checking their watches, tapping feet,as if grief ran on bus schedules,as if loss followed the lawsof linear time. As if "too"meant your dead, your divorce,your diagnosis. As if "shall"was a promise instead of a threat.
But grief moves at light speed and glacial pacesimultaneously. Quantum mechanics of the heart:existing in all states until observed.One minute you're fine, buying groceries,humming. Then—the brand of pasta she loved,and you're sobbing by the rigatoni,time-traveling to every meal you'll never share,aging a thousand years in aisle seven.
The first week takes a century.Each hour is a masterclass in eternity,each minute subdivided into framesof consciousness you never knew existed.But somehow the first year vanishes—where did April go? How is it Christmas?How did their birthday pass unmarkedwhen you counted every second until it arrived?
This is the speed of grief: both bullet and glacier,hummingbird and mountain. It laps youon Tuesday, finds you winning by Friday,then circles back Sunday night to remind youit never left, just changed uniforms.Three years later, it's the song in CVS.Ten years later, it's their gesturein a stranger's hand. Twenty years—it's forgetting, just for a second,that you can't call them, then rememberingat the speed of falling.
They're right—this too shall pass.But they're wrong about what "pass" means.It doesn't mean gone. It means movement—the way storms pass through towns,leaving them standing but rearranged.The way time passes through us,leaving us older but not over it.The way love passes between worlds,changing form but not intensity.
Grief passes the way seasons pass—returning, recycling, teaching usthat some things are too big for passing.They become weather patterns in your life,the climate you learn to dress for.This too shall pass through youat whatever speed it needs,for as long as it needs,until you understand:
Some things don't pass.They transform.You transform.And that's the only passing that matters.