Grief, the Nervous System, and the Myth of “Enough Time”

It’s been over a decade since my dad passed.

Even writing that sentence feels loaded, because the moment people hear how long it’s been, I can feel the shift. No one says it out loud, but the energy changes. There’s this unspoken assumption that enough time has passed, that I should be “better,” that grief should have softened into something quieter by now.But that’s not how grief works.And that’s definitely not how the nervous system works.

Grief is not linear. It never has been. There are days when it hits me out of nowhere, and days when it doesn’t touch me at all. There are years where anniversaries, birthdays, and holidays feel unbearable—and other years where I want to celebrate his life, laugh at his memory, and speak his name out loud without collapsing.

Regulated or dysregulated, grief is still grief.

From a nervous system perspective, this makes sense. Our bodies don’t move through loss in a straight line. We cycle. We ebb and flow between moments of grounding and moments of overwhelm. Sometimes we feel resourced, connected, even okay…and other times, our body remembers something before our mind catches up. A song. A smell. A date on the calendar. A version of ourselves that no longer exists.

That doesn’t mean we’re doing grief “wrong.” It means we’re human.

There’s also a particular kind of grief that comes with time. As the years go by, the version of my dad I can see so clearly in my mind becomes a little more distant. The sound of his voice, the sharpness of his features, the way he laughed...those memories soften. And that, too, is something to grieve.

Now, as a parent, there’s another layer. I have a child who will never get to meet him. She’ll never know him the way I did. And as she grows, there will always be a quiet sadness that he isn’t here to witness her life, to hold her, to love her in the way I know he would have. That grief doesn’t expire. It evolves.

February has always been complicated for me. The day my dad passed is also my mom’s birthday. So every year, I hold joy and sorrow at the exact same time. I celebrate my mother while grieving my father, and because I know her birthday carries its own weight, it makes the day even heavier for me. Loving one parent while mourning the other is a strange emotional dance..one my nervous system has had to learn over and over again.

This year, I tried something different.Instead of bracing myself for February, I chose to honor my dad in small, intentional ways throughout the month. Nothing big. Nothing performative. Just moments. Music. Reflection. Quiet acknowledgment. Letting myself remember without forcing myself to fall apart. Letting joy and grief coexist without asking either one to justify itself.

And for the first time in a long time, February felt… gentler.I don’t know that grief ever disappears. I don’t think it’s meant to. Love doesn’t end just because someone is gone. What can change is how we move with it ... how we allow our nervous system space to feel without judgment, timelines, or expectations imposed by others.

I will always miss my dad.

And that doesn’t mean I’m stuck. It means I loved deeply.If you’re grieving…whether it’s been one year or twenty..please know this: there is no expiration date on loss. There is no “should” when it comes to your nervous system. Some seasons will feel heavier than others, and some will surprise you with lightness. Both are valid.

Grief isn’t a problem to fix. It’s a process to be witnessed.And sometimes, simply allowing it to exist is the most regulating thing we can do.