Unspoken Grief: The Grief That Never Reached Her Lips | VB Bonny
On the things we do when we cannot say we are grieving.
I have never been particularly moved by a character simply telling me she is sad.
Not because sadness is insignificant. Not because words cannot carry grief. But because I have always wondered what happens to a person after the sadness has settled inside her, when the tears have dried, when the people around her have returned to their ordinary lives, and she is left with the quiet business of existing.
What does she do with her mornings? Does she still make tea for two?
Does she reach for the broken teacup before remembering?
Does she leave it cold on the shelf the next day, or does she always keep wiping dust?
I want to know these things. I had always been fascinated about this, what grief does to a person's habits before I hear, "I am sad."
A woman can say she misses her husband. She can cry into her pillow, keep rattling cupboards so that the house doesn't feel empty, and the jarring noise of one empty chair admitting that she is mechanically processing grief
But what intrigues me more is the woman who does said none of these words. Then, while putting away the laundry, she finds his old shirt. She folds it... She unfolds it. She folds it again.
And for a moment, she cannot remember why she is standing beside the cupboard.
Perhaps she puts the shirt away. Perhaps she wears it while sleeping. Perhaps she leaves it on the chair for another week.
I do not need her to tell me that she is grieving. I want to see what she does when the world expects her to continue as though nothing has happened.
Because grief does not always arrive as a breakdown. Sometimes, it becomes a small interruption in an otherwise ordinary afternoon.
Sometimes, it is the meal that goes cold. The chapathi that nobody touches.
The saree that has faded from repeated washing but remains in the cupboard because its owner cannot bear to discard the memory stitched into it.
Sometimes, it is a man who has stopped shaving, not because he has made a conscious decision to surrender to sorrow, but because the mornings have become longer and he no longer knows what he is preparing himself for.
These things do not explain grief. They let us approach it.
And there is a difference.
I want to see what grief has changed
When I write a character, I want to understand what her loss has done to her relationship with the world.
Has she stopped looking out of the window? Does she leave the lights on in rooms she no longer enters? Does she become impatient with people who complain about trivial things, or does she become unusually gentle with them?
Does she continue wearing the perfume he once loved, or does she avoid it because the scent brings back a version of herself she can no longer recognise?
Perhaps she has forgotten his voice but remembers precisely how he folded his sleeves.
Perhaps she no longer cries when someone mentions his name, yet she still turns towards the door whenever she hears footsteps in the corridor.
I am interested in that contradiction.
The woman who claims she has moved on but cannot throw away a broken teacup.
The man who says he has forgotten her but still buys the cologne she used to admire.
The person who resents the dead, the departed, the absent—and feels guilty for resenting them.
Grief is not always tender. It can be irritable, selfish, indifferent, exhausted. It can make a person cruel in one moment and painfully considerate in the next.
It can coexist with laughter.
A person can spend an entire evening enjoying herself and remember, halfway home, that there is nobody waiting for her.
I do not want to reduce these contradictions to a single declaration. I want to understand how they coexist within the same person.
Because a character is not merely the emotion she experiences. She is also the person who has to live with it.
The things that remain after someone leaves
I once found myself thinking about a house after its occupant had gone.
Not the grand, abandoned house from a ghost story. An ordinary house. One with cupboards, floorboards, teacups and familiar corners.
What would it remember?
The sound of bangles against a kitchen counter. The rustle of a saree passing through a doorway. The place where someone used to leave her slippers. The slight hesitation before a familiar hand turned the doorknob.
The house would not know how to say, I miss her.
It would simply remain full of the places where she had been.
Perhaps that is why I am drawn to objects in stories. A dress can remember an intimacy its wearer wishes to forget. A pair of shoes can preserve the shape of a childhood. A faded piece of fabric can hold the memory of a person long after the relationship itself has become impossible to return to.
Objects do not grieve in the human sense. We give them meaning because they survive the moments that made them important.
And sometimes, a character cannot speak about a loss directly, but she can touch the object that contains it.
She can wipe the dust from a pair of shoes. She can hold an envelope against a ceiling light.
She can stand before a mirror and realise that the face looking back at her belongs to someone who has lived through something she still cannot name.
The object does not replace the emotion. It gives the emotion somewhere to exist.
Why I leave some things unsaid
I do not believe every poem must be subtle. Sometimes a character needs to say, I am sad. Sometimes the simplest sentence is the truest one available.
But I am drawn to the moment before that sentence, and sometimes to the moment after it.
The trembling lips. The unfinished meal. The hand that reaches for someone who is no longer there.
I am interested in what a person cannot explain even to herself.
When I write grief, I do not want to assume that naming it is the same as understanding it. I want to follow it into the character's habits, her silences, her anger, her unreasonable attachments and the ordinary things she cannot bring herself to change.
I want to know whether she still makes two cups of tea.
I want to know whether she notices.
I want to know whether, one morning, she makes only one—and whether that feels like healing, betrayal, or nothing at all.
Perhaps she cries that morning. Perhaps she does not.
Perhaps she has already begun to heal without recognising the change.
I want to leave room for all these possibilities.
Because the absence of tears does not mean unspoken grief. Silence does not necessarily mean acceptance. And a person who has stopped speaking about someone has not necessarily stopped carrying them.
Sometimes, grief does not reach the lips.
It settles into the hands. It changes the way a person enters a room. It lives in the cupboard, the fading saree, the cold bread and the cup that remains untouched.
And sometimes, the most honest thing a character can do is continue with her day, carrying something she has not yet learned how to say.
Not every silence needs to be explained.
Some silences need only to be understood.
— VB Bonny
