WE often hear the same advice whenever someone experiences loss. Feel your feelings. Don't bottle them up. Give yourself time. We are introduced to the five stages of grief and encouraged to believe that healing follows a sequence, as though loss comes with a roadmap and an eventual destination.
But grief is rarely that orderly.
No one prepares you for the ordinary moments that suddenly become unbearable. No one tells you that grief can disguise itself as productivity, exhaustion, silence or distraction. It doesn't always arrive as tears.
The reality is that grief is often messy, irrational and deeply personal. It doesn't ask for permission, and it certainly doesn't follow a schedule.
Recently, I lost a dear friend.
His name was Syahir. He was only 26 years old.
He was healthy, full of kindness, endlessly generous with his time, and had an entire future waiting for him. He was the kind of person who made people feel welcome without trying, someone whose life seemed to be only beginning. News like that doesn't make sense. Your mind refuses to accept it because it contradicts everything you believed about tomorrow.
Perhaps that is why so many people are grieving him today. Syahir wasn't simply someone people knew. He was someone people genuinely loved. His kindness lingered long after every conversation, and his smile is already one of the things so many of us miss the most.
People often ask what grief looks like in those first few hours.
For me, it looked nothing like crying.
Instead, I cleaned.
I washed every dish in the kitchen. I swept the floors. I wiped every surface I could find. When there was nothing left to clean, I found something else. I reorganised cupboards that didn't need organising. I scrubbed things that were already spotless. I kept moving because I instinctively understood something I couldn't yet put into words.
The moment I stopped, the news would become real.
As long as I stayed busy, there was still a tiny part of me pretending that life hadn't changed. Chores became my temporary shelter from reality. They bought me a few more minutes in a world where my friend was still alive.
Eventually, there was nothing left to clean.
I left the house because I was afraid of sitting still. I drove without thinking, trying to outrun the silence. But the moment I sat in my parked car, everything caught up with me. The tears came all at once. It wasn't dramatic. It was simply what happens when your heart finally realised what your mind has been refusing to believe.
The next morning, I woke up to a house that felt impossibly quiet.
The silence was different. It wasn't the peaceful kind that comes after a good night's sleep. It was the kind that reminded me someone was missing from the world. My home felt empty, as though grief had settled into every room overnight. There was no new update that would somehow tell me it had all been a terrible misunderstanding. Just silence.
Looking back, I realise grief has visited my life more times than I ever imagined it would.
In 2021, I lost a friend to mental illness. For weeks, I cried whenever I was alone. For years afterward, I couldn't even bring myself to speak about him without feeling my chest tighten.
In 2022, another friend passed away from pneumonia. During my master's degree, there were days when money was tight and somehow, he always knew. Without making a fuss, he would quietly help me. Whenever I tried to pay him back, he would smile and tell me it was simply his contribution to my education. Losing him wasn't only the loss of a friend. It was losing one of the rare people whose kindness asked for nothing in return.
In 2024, both of my grandmothers passed away.
Their homes still stand exactly where they always did. The furniture hasn't moved. The walls still hold decades of memories. Yet, walking through those doors feels unfamiliar because the people who made those houses feel like home are no longer there. You begin to understand that grief isn't always about missing a person. Sometimes it's mourning a place that no longer exists in the way you remember it.
In 2025, another friend died after battling leukemia. He loved dancing. Watching him perform always felt effortless, as though joy itself had learned choreography. When he was gone, grief became something physical. My chest genuinely hurt. It felt less like sadness and more like carrying an invisible weight that refused to lift.
For a fleeting moment, I genuinely thought that having buried friends before would prepare me for this. That perhaps experience would soften the blow.
I was wrong.
You never get used to hearing that someone you care about is gone. You never become immune to the phone call that changes everything or the message that makes your heart sink before you've even finished reading it. Grief doesn't build immunity. If anything, every loss reminds you of the ones that came before. It awakens old wounds while creating a new one of its own.
If anything, it made the weight even heavier, because every goodbye carries the echoes of every goodbye that came before it.
And now, Syahir.
Twenty-six years old. A future still unfolding. A smile that should have lasted for decades more.
After enough losses, you begin to question everything people tell you about grieving.
There is no perfect way to mourn someone. There is no universal timeline for healing. There is no prize for being composed, and there is no shame in falling apart.
Sometimes grief is loud. Sometimes it is silent. Sometimes it appears months later when you unexpectedly hear their favorite song or pass the café where you last shared a conversation. Sometimes it arrives in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday for reasons you cannot explain.
Perhaps that is the greatest misconception about grief. We are taught that it is something we eventually overcome, something we move beyond if only we process it correctly.
But that has never been my experience.
We don't move on from the people we love.
We move forward with them.
The heartbreak doesn't necessarily become smaller. Instead, we slowly become stronger at carrying it. We learn how to make room for the memories alongside the pain. We discover that love doesn't disappear simply because someone does.
If you are grieving today, whether because of death or because of the quiet heartbreak of losing someone who is still alive but no longer part of your life, please know this.
You do not have to grieve gracefully.
You do not have to explain why today feels harder than yesterday.
You do not have to justify why you cleaned the house instead of crying, why you cried in your car instead of at the funeral, or why certain places still feel impossible to visit.
There is no right way to miss someone.
Your grief is not evidence that you are failing to heal. It is evidence that someone mattered. It is evidence that they changed you simply by being part of your life.
Syahir certainly did.
He reminded us that a life does not have to be long to be meaningful. Sometimes, the deepest impact comes from the quietest kindness, the warmest smile, and the simple act of making others feel seen.
The pain may never disappear completely, and perhaps it isn't meant to. Because hidden within every ache is something beautiful: a friendship that was genuine, a kindness that changed you, a love that existed, and a life that was worth mourning.
To everyone carrying loss quietly today, I hope you give yourself permission to grieve without comparison. However your heart chooses to remember, however your mind chooses to cope, however long it takes, that is enough.
Because love leaves an imprint.
So does kindness.
So did Syahir, to whom I dedicate this piece.
Muhammad Naim Muhamad Ali, PhD, also known by the moniker Naim Leigh, is a Communication and Media Studies lecturer at the University of Wollongong Malaysia. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Sinar Daily.