The E in Fine

Five years out, and I'm done explaining my grief to people who think I should be over it.

Hello, friend.

“How are you?” is a question I have answered more times than I can count since my husband Tom died five years ago, and I have almost never answered it honestly. Not because I was being deceptive, but because the honest answer requires more from the asker than most people realize they’re signing up for when they ask it. I wrote about this dreaded question back in 2021, weeks after he died. The honest answer, in the early months, was something like I am completely dismantled and I don’t know who I am without him and I keep reaching for my phone to text him things and he’s not there. That answer has nowhere to go in a hallway conversation.

So I learned to say fine. Or I might say hard but okay, which sounds honest but is actually a more sophisticated version of fine; it acknowledges the difficulty just enough to seem authentic without actually requiring anything from the listener. A therapist told me once that FINE is an acronym for fucked up, insecure, neurotic, and evasive. I filed that away as one of the more accurate things anyone has ever told me.

Bridgette Hamstead writes in “The Performance of Fine” about the automation of giving that answer, how it runs faster than the deliberate mind can intervene, how the labor of maintaining it is invisible because it’s designed to be invisible. Grieving people know this labor intimately. We know the calculation that happens in real time before every social interaction: how much of this can I say here? Who can actually hold this? Is this a fine conversation or a real one?

The grief version of this calculation is especially complicated because the performance is expected to change over time in ways that don’t always match the reality. In the early weeks, people expect you to be not fine, and there’s some permission to say so. Within months, the permission starts to expire. At some point, certainly by a year, you’re supposed to be “over it” or moving forward, at the very least. By five years, the expectation of fine is so thoroughly installed in the people around you that saying otherwise feels like a social violation, like you’re asking for something the interaction wasn’t designed to provide.

The whole model is based on the fallacy that grief is linear and that the goal of grieving is to eventually not grieve. Five years in, if I answer honestly on a difficult day—I’m pretty good, but I’m really missing Tom today—people don’t hear grief, they hear a malfunction. Their face reveals the recalibration they’re doing as they check the math. Didn’t he die a while ago? I watch them try to figure out if I’ve had a setback, if something triggered this, if something is seriously wrong with me.

What they can’t quite absorb is that there was no trigger. There’s no story that explains why I’m missing him more today than yesterday.

What I think they don’t understand is that missing isn’t a symptom of anything going wrong. It’s just what it is to have loved someone and lost them. I’m not stuck. I’m not having a hard day that needs a cause. I am a person who will grieve her husband for the rest of her life, in varying intensities, on a schedule that answers to nothing.

If you’ve been nodding along because you know exactly what it costs to say fine one more time, your timeline is not broken. There is no correct amount of time after which grief, or fear, or exhaustion is supposed to stop showing up. Whatever you’re carrying, and however long you’ve been carrying it, you don’t need it to make sense to the people asking.

So I say fine. And I’ll admit that most of the time now, the fine is evasion, the E in the acronym, chosen on purpose. I know exactly what “hard but okay” invites: the concern, the suggestions (often involving yoga or a miracle food), the gentle probing about whether I’ve talked to someone, whether I’ve thought about getting out more, whether five years is maybe long enough. I’m not evasive because I’m ashamed of missing him. I’m evasive because I don’t have the energy for a mini lesson on how grief works in the wild as opposed to the cleanliness of the mind, and I refuse to hand my grief over as evidence in an argument I never agreed to have.

This isn’t just a widow thing. Anyone who’s grieved a pet past the point other people think is reasonable knows this exact calculation—the bracing before you even answer, the pre-loaded defense of why you’re still sad about the dog, as if there’s a statute of limitations on loving.

People are allowed to be uncomfortable with grief that doesn’t resolve on schedule. That’s their business. But their discomfort is not my assignment. I don’t owe anyone a correction. I don’t owe anyone a syllabus on how grief actually works. I can offer one, sometimes, if I have the bandwidth and the person is someone I have an important relationship with. But it’s not required. It is not, and has never been, part of the job of grieving to also educate the people who think you’re doing it wrong.

So: fine. Evasive on purpose, and no longer sorry about it.

If something here resonates with you, I’d be honored if you shared it with someone who might need it today. Let’s help each other along on this journey. I’m grateful our paths have crossed.

Onward, in hope and solidarity.
Elizabeth

PS: My self-paced Journaling for Grief course is now available. It includes six lessons—audio recordings, written reflections, and journaling prompts—that you can move through at whatever pace feels right. Grief doesn’t follow a schedule, and neither does this course. You can find it here.