On resisting timelines and writing loss that endures, especially compared to visual media.
Pop culture and media have changed us as a society more than we care to admit. Movies and television have taught us that there is a neat structure to everything, to life itself, that we end up applying more often than we realize. We think too much in progressives; that one thing moves on and becomes the next, its previous form ceasing to exist.
Grief is one particular victim of this, especially the persistent myth that it moves forward.
We speak of it in stages, as though mourning were a linear process with a clear endpoint: shock, denial, anger, acceptance. The five stages of grief are a pop culture staple used often in movies and TV, and even as a literary device. The language is reassuring. It has both implicit and explicit progress. It suggests that grief, properly managed, will loosen its grip and eventually relinquish its hold on the living.
I cannot be said that literature hasn’t done the same, but at its most honest, it has never fully agreed. There is simply too much space for effective nuance to be included in the pages upon pages that can disappear if translated to the big screen.
Again and again, serious fiction returns to a different truth: grief does not pass so much as it settles. It becomes part of the internal landscape, altering perception, memory, and identity long after the loss itself has faded from public view. The dead leave, but their absence remains active. It’s supposed to, after all. They exist in memory, and memory stays with us. That’s what trauma is, unresolved memories and (often horrible) experiences that have shaped us.
This understanding places grief not as a phase, but as a condition. Joan Didion articulated this most famously in The Year of Magical Thinking, where mourning refuses to behave according to expectation. Her grief is not cathartic or enlightening; it is repetitive, illogical, and deeply resistant to closure. She documents its persistence as reality. Grief as a state of mind that continues to operate long after others believe it should have ended. Like trauma, it stays there, affecting us without our knowledge.
A similar refusal appears in C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, a text often mischaracterized as consolatory. Lewis does not arrive at peace so much as exhaustion. Faith does not erase loss; it merely coexists with it. His notebooks circle the same anguish repeatedly, as though circling were the only honest movement available.
What both works share is an insistence on duration. Grief is not something to be overcome, but something to be lived alongside. Fiction has long understood this, particularly in novels that privilege interiority over resolution. In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay’s death occurs almost parenthetically, yet its reverberations dominate the remainder of the book. The loss is never ‘processed’ in a conventional sense. Instead, it diffuses across time, reshaping memory, art, and relationships years later. Grief operates quietly, persistently, without spectacle or cure.
The argument here isn’t that visual media ignores grief, but that the written word offers a much wider, expansive area for us to explore this incredibly complex response. Grief cannot even be categorized as an emotion, or a state of being. It’s a response to an event, one that forever changes you—and keeps on doing so.
These works challenge the cultural expectation that mourning should improve us. The modern insistence on ‘healing’ often carries an implicit moral judgement: that lingering grief is indulgent, regressive, or unhealthy. But literature suggests another possibility—that grief’s persistence is not failure, but fidelity. To remember intensely, painfully, and repeatedly may be a form of loyalty rather than stagnation.
This is especially true when loss involves love that was unfinished, unresolved, or complex. In such cases, grief is not merely about absence, but about suspended meaning. Questions remain unanswered. Conversations end mid-sentence. Memory becomes the only remaining site of relationship.
W.G. Sebald’s novels operate almost entirely within this space. In Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, grief is ambient rather than event-driven. Loss saturates the narrative voice itself, shaping how the world is observed and described. The result is not a story of recovery but of coexistence.
For writers, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity. To write grief as enduring requires resisting narrative instincts toward resolution. It means allowing repetition, stasis, and ambiguity to remain. It risks frustrating readers who expect transformation or redemption, but when this approach aligns with the author’s authentic emotional experience, it produces work of rare integrity.
A writer (and readers) have to remember that we explore a character, and that complex feelings of grief are supposed to be their experience. Authenticity arrives when we allow it to be as beautiful and as messy as it is, rather than present a sanitized version of it that best suits our narrative. That can still be done, if your story demands it. Creative liberty always trumps what ‘should’ be done, but it isn’t mutually exclusive with being authentic.
Authenticity matters here. Writing enduring grief because it is fashionable or provocative will ring hollow. But writing it because that is how loss has actually shaped one’s inner life lends the work a quiet authority. Readers recognize when a writer is not performing grief, but inhabiting it.
This is why unresolved mourning, when done honestly, often feels more generous than tidy endings. It tells the reader: you are not failing if this still hurts. You are not broken if it never fully resolves. The book does not rush to reassure because reassurance would be a lie.
Even in novels where time passes and life continues, grief need not diminish. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, loss accumulates rather than recedes. Acceptance brings clarity rather than any sense of peace. The sadness remains intact, it’s what makes the grief real—or at least, feel real.
Literature that treats grief as permanent does not deny joy, meaning, or connection, either. It simply refuses to make them contingent on ‘forgetting.’ That’s not what moving on is supposed to be. Characters have to be able to live their full lives, and if they do not pretend that the grief has been neutralized, it makes them more grounded, like a real person.
But there’s also a reason it’s not often done in film and TV. Manchester by the Sea is often touted as a depressing film that is difficult to get through. Grief can be about things other than loss, too. The Banshees of Inisherin depicts this excellently, because its about the loss of friendship rather than about anyone actually dying. That can sound overly dramatic, to mourn ‘losing’ a friend in that sense, but it does acknowledge something we rarely ever do. But movies end in just a few hours. Sure, they can stay with you, but reading can take a lot longer, and let each moment, each memory, linger and let you absorb itself.
Those pieces of media are traditionally less viewed because of how real they can often be. Literature has more leeway to depict grief as it is, and to writers, readers, novelists, and anyone else willing to read and listen; be authentic, be real, and let the loss be something permanent. It can create something powerful. Hopefully, ‘Sometime Goodbye’ was exactly that.