The Law Of Survival

In ancient Rome, grief had a deadline. Ten months for widows. Less for everyone else. The assumption was that sorrow, if given structure, would eventually discipline itself. Anything longer was seen as indulgent. Weak. A failure to recover on schedule. It’s hard not to notice how quickly people expect you to move on. How their discomfort begins to dictate your restraint. As if staying quiet will make it easier for everyone.

There are days when grief feels less like sorrow and more like vestigial reflex. The body bracing for a predator long extinct. Muscles firing at shadows. The nerves don’t ask for permission; they act on ancient codes, primitive instructions etched before you were born. Fight. Flee. Survive. Except there is nothing left to survive. The threat is already past tense. You are living in its afterimage, flinching at the echo.

What unsettles me most is how the body insists on repeating it. The surge of adrenaline with nowhere to go. The heart hammering against an absence it mistakes for danger. You sit at a table, you lift a glass, and suddenly the ancient circuitry sparks, telling you to run. From what? From nothing. From memory. From the recognition that the real event has already consumed you and what remains is only the body. Rehearsing. Again and again. Its failure to save what it loved.

When I was a child, I found a baby rabbit in the yard. Small enough to disappear inside my hands. I fed it from an eyedropper, kept it alive in a shoebox lined with towels. For weeks its heart beat too fast beneath my fingers, the body bracing against a predator it had never seen. Survival rehearsed in miniature.

And then came the day I had to let it go. I carried the box to the edge of the field and tipped it forward. The rabbit vanished into the grass without looking back. I remember how quickly presence turned into absence, how the box seemed heavier once it was empty.

Even then I understood, in some primitive way, what Rome believed. That loss should be given an ending. A line drawn. A ritual release. But the body does not recognize limits. It remembers the pulse. The panic. The spasm beneath the skin. It keeps running the same reflex, long after the field has gone quiet.

What unnerves me most is not the body’s refusal to forget but how quickly others expect it to. As if grief should taper like a fever. Measurable in days until gone. There is always a point when their eyes begin to search you for signs of progress, for the performance of recovery. They want milestones. Proof you are trending toward normal. A forecast that assures them the worst is behind you. Their expectation is that sorrow behaves like an illness with a predictable course. A recovery charted on a timeline. Anything outside that frame becomes suspect. Excessive. Indulgent. A failure to heal on schedule.

I remember the day my son died. The doctors working over him. The room both frantic and motionless. Voices calling out orders. Hands pressing. Air pushed into lungs that would not respond. I knew before they stopped. I knew he was already gone. And when it ended, when the noise gave way to stillness, the silence cut through me.

There are images I cannot unsee. His skin cooling too quickly. The nurses stepping back. Faces fixed in something not quite pity. Not quite relief. The first thing I did was fall to the ground. My body giving way. Somehow upright in another sense, moving through motions I did not recognize as mine. I remember my heart, not in my chest but beside him. Laid down on the sheets next to his small hand. As if it had left me entirely. As if it had chosen to stop with him. For a moment I believed it had. Believed nothing in me would move again. And yet I did. That is the cruelty of endurance. The body keeps going. Even when the heart has chosen otherwise. Sometimes I wonder if what beats in me is even a heart at all. Perhaps it is only a record of what it lost. A mechanism, not a refuge. It does its work while refusing mine. It goes on, and I go with it. That is survival. Nothing more.

I do not call this living, though it resembles it from a distance. The gestures remain. A fork lifted. Words exchanged, the body bent into sleep. But beneath it all, the pulse is impersonal, indifferent. It carries me forward without asking if I consent. And so the days accumulate. Not chosen. Absorbed.

People mistake composure for healing. They see you eat, speak, sleep, sit at a table and believe you have rejoined the living. They confuse resemblance with return. What they witness is not the self they remember; it is only the mechanism, the machine of breath and muscle going through its cycles.

I have learned to mimic the rituals of the unbroken. To nod at the right moments. To hold a glass without trembling. To smile just long enough to quiet their questions. Each gesture a disguise, a way of making my void palatable to them.

Inside, the reflex remains. It stirs without warning, a tremor beneath the skin, a tightening at the back of the throat. Not grief exactly, but its scar, carried in the body long after the threat is gone.

Rome believed grief could be timed. That if you marked the calendar, the heart would obey. Ten months. Then closure. Ten months. Then return. But the body does not read decrees. It does not bind its wounds on command. The scar remains, insisting on its own clock. Days stretch into years, and still the reflex stirs. What Rome called excess is only survival refusing to be legislated.

There is no timeline to grief. It cannot be measured in months or years, as if sorrow were obedient to the calendar. It is not indulgence when the ache refuses to leave. It is not a failure to have had enough time.

What Rome decreed as excess is the form my life has taken. It is not a failure to heal; it is the truth of survival. Grief does not conclude. It does not taper like fever, resolve like infection, fade like weather. It stays.

I wake into it. I sleep beside it. I eat with it lodged in my throat. It does not wait outside; it inhabits every room, every gesture, every word.

The world wants progress, milestones, evidence that I have turned a corner. But grief is not a road. It has no corner. It is a terrain that remakes itself each day, unrecognizable and without map.

Closure is a lie. Deadlines are for the living, not the bereaved. The scar is permanent. Proof that I loved. Proof that I was changed.