There is a particular kind of grief that arrives before the loss itself — quiet, patient, standing just outside the door. It comes when someone we love begins to disappear not all at once, but slowly, the way a star dims before you notice it's gone.
I know this grief. I lived inside it for a long time. And now, the star has gone out.
The North Star Grows Dim
My grandmother could no longer see the stars clearly, toward the end.
She lived in a seniors' residence four hours away — a place of soft light and careful hands, where I visited when I could. Each time I made the drive, I steeled myself. The doctors had warned me: there might come a day when she searched my face and found a stranger. A day when the granddaughter she raised, held, and loved simply did not register behind her eyes.
Last visit, I found her seated facing the window. I approached and took her hands, letting her eyes move over mine — hoping she might see me there, twinkling somewhere in the space between her memories.
I watched her reach for my name the way you reach for something in the dark. Not frantic, but earnest. Searching.
And then — before any words came — something else happened. Something that has stayed with me ever since.
Her shoulders dropped. Her hand firmed around mine. A long, slow breath moved through her, and with it, a smile — the kind that comes not from recognition, but from belonging. She had found me not in her memory, but somewhere deeper. She felt me the way we feel the presence of a vast sky even when we cannot see a single star.
"It is Tania," I told her gently. "And I love you."
Clarity broke through like light through cloud. She smiled and nodded — and then, honestly, beautifully, she confessed: "Tania, I don't always remember."
Tracing Constellations
So I told her about her own constellations.
I did what you do when you want someone to find Orion: you start with what's brightest and you trace a line, one point to the next, slowly, giving each one space. I walked her through the great events of her life — not to restore them, but to lay them out like stars across a dark cloth, so she could sense their shape.
With each story, she didn't so much remember as she settled. She relaxed not into the memories themselves, but into the space between them — that deep, dark, velvety space where belonging lives.
This is what I learned in that small room by the window:
Comfort does not always come from remembering. It comes from knowing that something is there, even when it cannot be seen.
I feel this same comfort on a clear night. I stand under the sky and look up at what I cannot fully comprehend — the incomprehensible depth of it, the stars too numerous to count, most of them invisible to me — and instead of feeling lost, I feel held. The darkness is not emptiness. It is fullness that exceeds my sight.
My grandmother felt her place in that universe again, even for just a moment. Connected. Starlit.
When the Sky Clouds Over
She was my North Star. She oriented me my whole life — her laugh, her hands, her particular way of making everything feel survivable. I always knew how to find my way by her.
Now my skies have clouded over. I look for her twinkle and am greeted by dark.
I will not pretend I was not afraid of this. I was. And now that it is here, the dark is as wide as I feared it would be — and something more than I expected, too.
Because that afternoon beside her chair gave me a gift I am only now beginning to open. Sitting with her, tracing the lines of her constellation together, I was reminded of what the dark actually holds.
The stars do not disappear when clouds cover them. They are there — vast, ancient, burning — whether my eyes can find them or not. The darkness between stars is not absence. Astronomers will tell you that the deep dark of space is where the most interesting things live: the force that holds galaxies together, the unseen matter that makes up most of what is real.
What we cannot see is not what is not there.
Learning to Grieve in the Dark
Grief, in its most acute form, is the sudden loss of a star you have always navigated by. You look up and find dark where there was once light, and the world tilts. You do not know which direction is home.
But we are never without constellation. We are always held inside a pattern of love — people who have shaped us, stories that have formed us, moments that have become part of our very orientation. These do not disappear when a person does. They reconfigure. They become part of the permanent map.
My grandmother is now something I carry inside me rather than visit. Her hands, her laugh, her way of loving — these live in the way I reach for my own children, in the stories I tell at tables, in the warmth I try to extend to strangers. She has become, as all great loves do, the dark matter of my life: invisible, immense, essential.
The North Star does not have to be visible to remain north.
What I Will Always Remember
I will remember her as I saw her that afternoon: the moment her shoulders dropped, her hand tightened, and she smiled — not because she had found a name, but because she had found a presence. A place of belonging in a sky that was growing dimmer.
We do not need perfect memory to feel love. We do not need to see the stars to be held by the sky.
She is gone now. The clouds have rolled in. And I am learning — imperfectly, slowly — to trust what she showed me in that small room by the window. That magnitude does not require visibility. That the dark between stars is not emptiness but depth. That belonging is not lost simply because we can no longer find its edges.
I look for her in the dark.
And I trust that she is there — burning, somewhere beyond my sight, part of the constellation that has always told me where I am and who I am and that I am loved.
Connected. Starlit. Never lost.
If you are carrying a grief — one that has arrived early, or one that has landed fully — I hope you find a clear night and look up. Not for answers, but for company. You are not navigating alone. You are held inside something vast and patient and full of more light than you can see.
