(Day 8)
Today is day eight.
Eight days since Mum died.
Eight days since the world changed and then carried on regardless.
I’ve been searching for language that doesn’t dramatise or minimise what I’m experiencing. Not the emotional story of grief, but the functional reality of it, how it lives in the body, the brain, the nervous system.
The clearest phrase I have is this:
I am operating at half-mast.
I understand that phrase now in a way I never did before.
When a flag is flown at half-mast, it isn’t broken.
The pole hasn’t failed.
The flag isn’t lazy, deficient, or incapable of rising.
It is lowered intentionally, as a mark of honour.
As a visible acknowledgement that something meaningful has been lost.
That is how I am moving through the world right now.
I am here.
I am present.
I am awake.
And my capacity, cognitively, neurologically, emotionally, is reduced.
Thoughts arrive slowly.
Words take effort.
My body feels heavy, as though I’m walking through treacle. There is less bandwidth for complexity, decision-making, output. Not because I don’t care, but because my system is busy doing something else.
This isn’t a motivation issue.
It’s not a mindset problem.
It’s physiology.
Grief doesn’t just live in the heart, it lives in the nervous system. Research into early bereavement shows that in the days and weeks after loss, stress hormones rise, cognitive processing slows, memory and verbal fluency can be affected, and emotional capacity narrows. The body reallocates its resources toward processing and integration, not productivity, not clarity, not performance. In other words, half-mast isn’t just metaphorical. It’s biological.
This is what grief does.
And yet, so often, we expect ourselves, or others, to raise the flag back to full height far too soon. To function normally. To “be okay.” To return to life as if something essential hasn’t been fundamentally altered.
But something has altered.
Operating at half-mast doesn’t mean stopping.
It means adjusting to a new internal reality.
It means allowing slowness without self-judgement.
Allowing gaps in concentration.
Allowing reduced emotional bandwidth without trying to override it.
It means honouring love, not just in memory, but in how gently we let the body integrate its loss.
Day eight feels like this:
I can do some things.
I can’t do others.
And both are true at the same time.
Half-mast is not failure.
It is an appropriate response to grief.
It is the body’s way of saying: this mattered.
She mattered.
If you are in the early days after loss, or carrying grief that has resurfaced long after others expect you to be “better”, I want you to know this:
There is nothing wrong with you.
Your nervous system is doing exactly what it is designed to do when love no longer has a physical place to land.
So let yourself be at half-mast.
For as long as you need.
There is no prize for raising the flag too soon.
No virtue in pretending you are at full capacity when you are not.
Grief isn’t asking us to be strong.
It’s asking us to be honest.
And on day eight, honesty looks like half-mast.
