How Loss Breaks Our Sense of Time

One of the strangest parts of grief — the part no one warns you about — is how time completely loses its structure. I can look at a calendar. I can count the months. I can say the number of years out loud. And yet inside my mind and body, none of it feels true. Grief doesn’t follow the clock. It bends time, freezes it, stretches it, and compresses it until you don’t know what’s real anymore.

And within that, there’s something even more confusing — something many grieving people quietly carry:

Some loved ones stay frozen at the exact age they were when they died…while others feel like they’re somehow still aging with us.

I live this contradiction every single day.

My dad died at 52, and in my mind, he is still 52. He has never aged a day beyond that

But my son, Dylan, died at 18… and somehow, I feel like he’s now 19… 20… the age he should be. It feels like he’s still moving through time with me, even though he isn’t here physically.

It seems impossible. But the brain actually has reasons for this.

When someone dies suddenly, tragically, or simply far before we’re ready (as if we ever could be), the mind locks onto the last “version” of them it remembers. It’s like a snapshot the brain protects at all costs. That’s why my dad is still 52. There are no new memories to update him, no new conversations, no new moments. The brain freezes him at his final age because that’s the last stable imprint it has.

But love doesn’t freeze. And relationships don’t freeze either.

Just because a person’s physical life ended doesn’t mean the relationship ended. My love for Dylan didn’t stop at 18. My identity as his mom didn’t stop. My mind still imagines who he would be this year, what he’d look like now, the way his voice might sound as he got older. It’s not that I think he’s physically aging — it’s that my heart continues to grow around him.

Parents are wired to imagine their children’s futures. Even when the worst happens, the brain doesn’t shut off the part that envisions them moving forward. So it feels like Dylan moves through time with me, while my dad stays held in the age I last saw him. Two different losses create two different time experiences — not because of denial, but because the emotional bonds are different.

There’s also the piece no one can see from the outside: how trauma affects time.

Grief, especially traumatic loss, affects the hippocampus — the part of the brain responsible for organizing time and sequence. When the emotional shock is too big, the brain stops separating past, present, and future in a clean line. Everything collapses into one long moment. That’s why it can feel like the loss just happened yesterday, and also like it happened a lifetime ago, and somehow like it’s still happening now. All at once.

This is why anniversaries can feel strange or irrelevant.

Why the heaviness can show up on a random Wednesday as intensely as it does on the “big dates.”

Why time becomes something I watch — but no longer feel.

Logically, I know what happened. I know Dylan is gone. I know my dad is gone. But the emotional brain doesn’t operate on logic. The emotional brain is wired for attachment, not facts. It still expects them. It still searches for them. It still updates them in dreams and imagination. It still protects the bond.

So the logical brain says, “They are no longer here.”

But the emotional brain whispers, “But the love remains.”

And that creates a strange split in how time is felt.

Over time — and this took me a while to understand — I’ve realized that time doesn’t heal grief. It never has. What time does is help the mind learn how to hold two truths at the same time:

They stopped aging

But our love didn’t.

Eventually, the sharp edges soften. Not because we forget, but because our brains slowly weave their absence into a presence we carry with us. They become less of a wound that breaks us and more of a companion that lives gently within us. Time doesn’t heal grief — but eventually, it helps us carry it.

And if you’re a grieving mother reading this, wondering why time feels so wrong, or why your child feels older than they were, or why your mind does this strange dance with ages and memories — please hear this:

You’re not broken.

You’re not failing at grief.

You’re not “stuck.”

Your brain is doing exactly what a loving brain does.

It is trying to keep the connection alive in the only ways it still can.

It is trying to carry your child forward with you.

It is trying to love them in a world where they are no longer physically here.

There is nothing wrong with you.

his is what love looks like when it has nowhere physical left to go.

And you are not alone.

My dearest Dylan,

You are forever 18 in the last moments I held you,

and somehow you are also every age you should have been.

You exist in my past, my present, and my imagined future —

in memory and in possibility.

Time may have stopped for you,

but the love hasn’t

It never will.

I will carry you forward

in every year you didn’t get to live.

Always my boy.

Always my heart.

Always my shine.