The sorrow I felt had a language and texture all its own. So I did what my journalism training taught me to do: drink more and dive into research. I learned about the stages of grieving, the physical symptoms, the scientific blah blah blah of it. Armed with all that information, I felt soothed and masterful, and after a respectable number of months, I thought I’d Marie Kondo-ed my way out of it. The knee-buckling weeping, the dream state numbness, the radioactive sorrow were jettisoned because they did not spark joy. I pushed them into the past tense. Dad was tucked neatly into my memory. I’d made peace. Found closure. Was moving on.

Then I ran into a friend in a bookstore. She looked like a crack addict—haggard, glassy-eyed. With my grief-vision goggles, I could see that she had a dust cloud of the stuff billowing around her. She told me her father had died a few weeks earlier, and this was the first time she had left the house.

“You lost your father too, didn’t you?” she asked in a trembling voice. Then the world went small, and we stopped talking. We leaned against a table full of books, crying and holding hands. I didn’t even really like her that much, but grief had branded and fused us. Familiar and dreaded feelings resurfaced, and I was again swimming through oatmeal, back in the gluey eddies of grief.

I had yet to learn that grief can play a perverse version of Mother May I, sending us back to the starting line for pretending that we are okay or for hurrying it along. Grief really does not like for you to tell it to go faster.

Amplifying my grief was my subterranean shame (I should be getting over this faster!), my confusion (Am I a freak?) and my fear (I will never feel good again.) The more I sought to fold and bend grief into soothing shapes like some sort of emotional origami, the more it gormed all over me, the more it roared back.

I was a novice then. Loss now is more familiar, as is the grief that is its travelling companion. I have learned that grief has riptides. Grief is bossy. Grief makes me—makes us all—its bitch. And instead of fighting, denying or managing, I have learned to fall to the ground and roll onto my back like a submissive animal. Grief feels these days like a long foreign film with no subtitles: I am not always sure what is going on, but if I roll with it and stay for the entire film, the end eventually comes, and I am left with a lot to think about.

The call came last week. A longtime friend has died. We were once lovers, neighbors, buddies. He was my age, and he died doing what he loved. As I heard the news, I blurred into a feeling of gauzy dislocation. Ah, this. This again.

I’ll go to my friend’s memorial service and mourn with the others. I imagine I’ll have trouble sleeping and may find myself crying when I speak of him. I’ll consider the terror of the unknown and the satisfaction of a life still unfolding. I’ll reach for those I love and wonder more hauntingly about my own expiration date. And I shall hoist upon my shoulders the aching, glorious weight of loss. I shall enfold myself in this grief and try, once again, to know it as a privilege.