Grief and the Change of Seasons
Personal Perspective: Any change can remind us that our loved one is gone.
Updated October 30, 2025 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
The change of season has a way of stirring up grief even if we’ve been living with a while.
Each change of season is a visceral reminder that time is passing ; the day our loved one last walked the Earth is receding into the increasingly distant past. Time’s passage seems to take them further from us, even though dead is dead is dead, and they are really no further away than they were the moment they breathed their last.
Any change can be a reminder
But I find that any change at all provokes new twinges of loss. I still find it hard to believe, and heartbreaking, that Tom has not met the two silly dogs I adopted. I felt guilty rearranging our bedroom to accommodate their crates by moving his dresser against a different wall, all but erasing the memory of him standing by it in his skivvies. I bought a new car a few months ago, and it bothers me that he has never sat in the passenger seat. I still think about my old car sitting in the dealer’s lot where I left it, a little Tom spirit still lingering in it.
Living with Tom for so long I took on his habits, and even those are hard to change. Tom was a dinner-every-night, meat-veggie-potatoes guy; he didn’t mess around at dinnertime. I have never been much of a cook, so he did most of the cooking. (“You like to cook,” I would say. “No, I like to eat,” he’d retort.) For some reason I found this insistence on dinner every night oppressive: I called it the tyranny of dinnertime. I liked the time spent together, but I hated that it seemed to stop my day short, even if I wanted to keep doing whatever it is I was doing when he came home hungry.
We may resist change without knowing why
But now, more than five years later, I still follow the same dinner rituals we had together: eating around the same time, trying to make myself balanced meals. (I still don’t enjoy cooking.) The main difference is that I have moved from what was my usual seat at the table to his, so I don’t have to look at his empty chair. Only on very rare occasions do I break habit and just snack for dinner, despite moaning and groaning through preparing my meal most nights. I couldn’t tell you if I continue the ritual because I like it or because he did and I want to honor him. All I know is it’s a ritual I have not changed, even though I sometimes resented it in the past. (Which kind of hurts to say aloud. I’m sorry, Tommy.)
I have made improvements to a couple of rooms in my house and feel bad that I get to enjoy them but he doesn’t. Eventually I’m going to need a new sofa, and that will hurt because we picked this one out together. Buying a new mattress was hard enough. I still sleep on my side of the bed, though. About a year in I tried remaking the bed for one instead of two, but I couldn’t bear it. I changed it back almost immediately, and that’s how it remains. His side has become my alternate office; I like to sit there with my laptop and work.
In a way this dovetails with the difficulty many of us have parting with our loved ones’ possessions. Most of Tom’s music equipment (he was a guitarist in rock bands) still takes up space in my garage, but every time I think about selling it, an ache in my chest tells me I’m not ready. That stuff is not him, but it also is him. I feel his essence when I look at it, which I do almost daily, and emptying that corner of the garage still feels impossible. His acoustic guitar still leans in a corner of the kitchen, by what used to be his seat at the table, as it always has because he liked to noodle on it there. Moving it is unthinkable, and it’s not in the way, so I don’t.
Loss is so big a change, anything more seems too much
Losing Tom was such a massive change in my world, I can only handle so much more. I still cling to whatever I can. Perhaps that way I think I have some control over the loss. I couldn't stop Tom from dying, but I can prevent the loss of more if I cling to what was his, what was ours. It is a form of magical thinking , to quote the title of Joan Didion's beautiful book, The Year of Magical Thinking.
But I can’t stop the change of season. The leaves are turning again. It is my sixth autumn without Tom and yes, I’m still counting. Maybe I will forever because I will miss him forever. That's one thing that will never change.
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Sophia Dembling is a Dallas-based writer and the author of Introverts in Love: The Quiet Way to Happily Ever After.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.