How Am I Supposed to Grieve Right Now?

Someone you loved has died, and you’re also pregnant, or holding a baby who needs you every few hours, in a season the whole world has already decided should be nothing but joyful. Underneath the exhaustion sits a harder question than it first appears to be. Not just how am I supposed to grieve right now, but am I failing both grief and parenthood at once? Am I dishonoring the person who died by getting up to make a bottle instead of falling apart? How am I supposed to welcome one life while mourning another?

A Baby Doesn’t Stop Needing You Because Someone Died

Here’s the part almost no one says out loud: a baby’s needs don’t pause for your grief. Diapers still need changing. Feedings still happen every few hours. You still have to answer the pediatrician’s questions, remember the next appointment, keep showing up, all while some part of you feels like your own life just ended. There’s something genuinely surreal about grieving in early parenthood. You don’t get the privilege of disappearing into it the way grief sometimes asks you to. You have to keep making bottles.

That’s not a smaller kind of grief. It’s a harder one, carried in public, in fifteen-minute intervals, without the luxury of collapsing all the way down.

Two Different Kinds of Exhaustion

Grief has a well-documented cognitive signature researchers sometimes call grief brain: memory lapses, trouble concentrating, losing your train of thought mid-sentence, walking into a room and forgetting why. It isn’t a character flaw. Research on bereavement has found it activates some of the same neural pathways as physical pain, and disrupts sleep and attention in ways that are measurable, not imagined.

Pregnancy and early parenthood produce a real cognitive fog of their own, driven by exhaustion, hormonal shifts, and a brain reorganizing itself around a new person’s survival. You’re not managing one kind of exhaustion right now. You’re managing two, layered on top of each other, and the fog you’re in isn’t evidence of failing at either grief or parenthood. It’s what two genuine, documented states look like when they happen to arrive at the same time.

Joy and Grief Keep Interrupting Each Other

They don’t take turns politely. You’re sobbing, and then the baby smiles, and you laugh before you can stop yourself, and then you think, how could I laugh right now? You’re laughing at something small and ordinary the baby did, and mid-laugh you remember, and think, how could I have forgotten, even for a second? Whichever feeling arrives second tends to feel like a betrayal of the one that came first, when really it’s just what a mind carrying both at once actually does.

Neither interruption is a sign you’re grieving wrong or loving wrong. It’s what it looks like to hold two enormous things in a body that only has one nervous system to hold them with.

The Ache of What Won’t Happen Now

Part of this grief is about someone specific being gone. Part of it is about everything that person won’t get to be part of now, and that second grief keeps arriving in pieces, at moments no one warns you about: the first ultrasound they won’t see. The birth they were supposed to be there for. The first birthday. The first holiday with an empty chair where they used to sit. Hearing your child learn a name for them that they’ll never actually answer to. A graduation, a wedding, a whole life of moments that used to have a person standing in them, now permanently missing one.

Nearly every milestone from here forward carries two things at once: the celebration itself, and the absence sitting right beside it. That doubling isn’t something to fix or get past. It’s simply what this particular grief does to time going forward, for longer than anyone else may realize.

This Deserves Witnesses

Almost everyone around you can see the pregnancy, or the baby. Almost no one can see the person standing in the same room, quietly grieving underneath all the congratulations. That invisibility is its own kind of loneliness, distinct from the grief itself: carrying something enormous while the people around you only have eyes for the part of your life that looks like celebration.

You don’t need everyone to understand what you’re carrying in order for it to be real. But you deserve at least a few people who do, who can see both things about this season at once, the way you’re already having to.

Grief Doesn’t Require Full Capacity to Be Real

You don’t have to grieve fully or immediately to be grieving honestly. If caring for a baby is taking up most of what you have right now, the grief doesn’t disappear. It waits, sometimes for longer than feels comfortable, and it’s still exactly as real when it finally gets the room it needs as it would have been if you’d had that room from the start.

You don’t have to finish grieving before you can keep loving. And you don’t have to stop loving in order to keep grieving.

If You’re Looking for This Kind of Companionship

In Awe was built to hold seasons that don’t fit the story everyone else expects them to tell, including this one. Join In Awe whenever you’re ready.