Losing Easta: Grief, Love and What Remains

Grief doesn’t wait for the world to pause. It arrives when it arrives — and then it stays, quietly, persistently, alongside whatever else is happening. Even now, in March, when the land is beginning to wake, when green is returning in careful, tentative patches and birdsong is edging back into the mornings. It doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t check the season. It just… lives here now.

31st March would have been Easta’s 29th birthday. And birthdays have a way of pulling someone forward in time, whether you’re ready or not. They remind you that a life had rhythm. Seasons. Milestones. That those things don’t just disappear because the body is gone.

I lost Easta at the end of November. That late-autumn edge, where everything is already thinning. The light pulling back. The trees letting go. The ground holding what’s been shed. There’s a kind of honesty to that season. Nothing pretending to be alive when it isn’t. Nothing rushing what’s ending. Grief made sense there, in a way. It matched the landscape. The world was already in retreat.

What’s harder is this. March. When everything begins again. When the world quietly insists on movement, on return, on life carrying on as if something fundamental hasn’t shifted. Because grief doesn’t follow the seasons like that. It doesn’t stay where it started. It comes with you.

What surprised me most wasn’t the intensity of the sadness, though there was plenty of that. It was the way love didn’t go anywhere. The relationship didn’t end. It changed shape, yes, but it didn’t disappear.

And that’s the part we don’t talk about enough. We’re often taught that grieving well means letting go. That healing is measured by how quickly we can return to normal, by how neatly we can reorganise ourselves around the absence. But grief doesn’t work like that. Love doesn’t work like that.

Grief moves through the body before it moves through language. Through habits. Through muscle memory. Through the moments where you reach for what used to be there without thinking. It lives in the pause before realising. In the absence your nervous system registers before your mind catches up. It’s not neat. It’s not linear. It’s lived.

And birthdays sharpen that. They don’t just bring sadness — they bring presence. A quiet but undeniable sense of you should be here. A remembering that’s not abstract but specific. The texture of someone. The shape of them in your life. March makes that contrast louder. The birds come back. The light stretches out. Green returns. And still — something is missing. Both things are true.

With Easta, what I lost was presence. The physical, sensory reality of her. The sound. The smell. The weight. The way she filled space. What remains is connection. Memory. Imprint. The way she shaped my nervous system simply by existing in my life. That doesn’t vanish. It changes how it shows up, but it doesn’t leave.

Grief doesn’t mean the bond was broken. It means the bond mattered.

In my work, I sit with people who worry they’re grieving “too much” or “not enough.” Who wonder if they’re stuck, if they’re doing it wrong, if they should be further along by now. But grief isn’t a task to complete. It’s a relationship that continues....altered, but still alive. And the pressure to tidy it up, to make it look acceptable, to move on in a way that makes other people comfortable… that’s where more pain gets layered on.

March doesn’t ask the land to forget winter. It builds on it. Quietly. Gradually. Without forcing anything into bloom before it’s ready. And grief asks for the same. Not to be rushed. Not to be fixed. Not to be turned into a neat story about resilience. But to be carried, honestly, into whatever comes next.

So if a birthday or anniversary has brought your grief closer this month, it doesn’t mean you’re going backwards. It means the bond is still alive in you. It means love is still doing what love does — finding a way to stay. And some relationships don’t end. They just change how they live alongside you.

— Sarah xx