Casey Moeckel

Picture a house. From the outside, it looks perfectly normal. Cheery, even! A fresh coat of paint makes it feel welcoming. It stands strong and sturdy, surrounded by a well-tended garden, with warm light spilling from its windows. You pass it every day, and every day it looks the same. Everything is orderly. Nothing seems amiss.

But inside, it is very different.

The house has lost the foundation it was built upon. The earth beneath it suddenly opened and swallowed it whole. That foundation, once a source of security and stability, has vanished. All that remains are destabilized walls and a roof; the outward signs of normalcy. But within, there is only the hollow echo of what’s been lost.

This is what grief feels like.

Aftershocks and the Space That Remains

Grief is an earthquake with aftershocks that reverberate through your life. Its cruelty lies not only in the first shock of losing the ground beneath you, but in the repeated realizations that the permanence you trusted—the foundation you believed was a certainty in life, like having oxygen to breathe—was never truly there. The firm ground you thought your life was built upon was an illusion, one we all cling to because the alternative is terrifying.

Even physics reminds us of this: the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that everything leans toward change, that the universe is always moving from a state of order into disorder.

Nothing lasts. Not the trees in the forest, not the rocks in the desert, not even our own lives. Change is the only constant. And though we know this, we love to forget it.

But science can only take us so far. It explains the unraveling, not the ache of the human heart. For that, we turn to artists, who have always tried to give shape to what language struggles to hold. As actor Sir Mark Rylance once said about his own experience with immense grief:

“I feel hollowed out by loss but I don’t feel the need to refill that hollow place…you realise that empty spaces can be good. Miles Davis’s trumpet, Jacqueline du Pré’s cello would be nothing without the emptiness inside, carefully carved out by someone.” 

The beauty exists because of the hollowness carved into your heart by those you love. But that space is not emptiness alone; it is the shape of their presence and love carried forward inside of you.

What Holds Us, What Fails Us

When I was 16, my dad died of a heart attack. It was my first real experience with loss, and it shaped me in ways I’m still discovering. Since then, I’ve lost grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, and most recently, my soul-dog of over fifteen years.

This was my beautiful Bailey. 

When I think about my grief for Bailey, I return to a line from one of my favorite books, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr: 

“It’s embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.”

Bailey was light and joy, loyalty and patience, comfort and constancy. Quite simply, he was the best boy. He died of natural causes, but if love had been enough to keep him here, he would still be by my side.

Even now, language collapses under the weight of my love for him. He’s the reason I’m writing this essay and still every sentence feels inadequate. Silence might be the only thing honest enough.

When Bailey died, the emptiness he left behind was so vast, at times it felt like a black hole pulling everything inward, its gravity threatening to take me with it.

But as Mark Rylance said, the answer is not to try to fill that void. You can’t. The answer is to accept its presence, work to live beside it as best you can, and to let life continue around it.

Saltwater

Grief is a tidal wave of emotions: disbelief, sorrow, anger, yearning. It reshapes the landscape of who we are. Memories that once brought only joy become bittersweet reminders of what once was. And yet, in mourning, there is also a profound beauty.

When my dad died, it turned my world inside out. I didn’t know how to process my grief; I only knew that it had changed me forever. When Bailey died, in a way, it was worse because I knew what grief did to a person. I knew there was no “going back.” The person I was before each loss was gone, too.

In the film adaptation of The Return of the King, Frodo asks: 

“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand… there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold.”

I have found that to be the truth. But it’s not the whole truth. Because while there is no going back, it doesn’t mean grief condemns us to a life of endless sorrow.

Imagine a glass of water with a cup of salt dropped in. Try to drink it and it’s unbearable. But pour that same amount of salt into a lake, and it disappears into the vastness. The water is still salted, but drinkable. The amount of salt hasn’t changed, only the container holding it.

Thich Nhat Hanh once described suffering this way in The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching.

Think of the salt as your grief. At first, your capacity to hold it is small. Over time, you expand. You become the lake. The grief is still there, but it no longer chokes you with every sip.

When I put Mark Rylance and Thich Nhat Hanh side by side, I hear the same truth in two different languages. Grief hollows us out, yes. But that hollowing also makes us bigger, like a lake wide enough to dissolve the salt. We expand around our grief so we can hold what once felt unbearable.

Where the Shore Gives Way

I wish I had all the answers. Wouldn’t that be nice? I wish Bailey and all those I’ve lost were still here. But all I can do—all any of us can do—is sit beside that hollowness Rylance spoke of and learn to build around it while we walk this side of eternity.

Yes, grief is the salt in the water. It never disappears. But in time, we grow wider, deeper, and vast enough to hold it.

It’s not that grief gets smaller, no. It’s that we can become an ocean.

*This essay was written by a human. Yes, there are some em dashes and some lyrical comparisons. Calm down. That’s not AI. I just like them.*