Out of Body While Grieving There are days when I feel like I’m standing outside of myself — watching my life unfold from a distance. I go through familiar motions: speaking, working, teaching, engaging with the world — yet it often feels as though I’m observing someone else doing it all. Since losing my daughter, this sensation has become familiar. It’s a quiet disconnection that arrives without warning — a strange, almost surreal awareness that I’m here, but not entirely in the moment. It’s as if my body is present, but my mind has stepped slightly aside. In the beginning, I thought this meant something was wrong with me. But I’ve come to understand that this, too, is grief. When the pain becomes too heavy, the mind instinctively distances itself to protect the heart. It’s not a conscious choice, but a response — a way to keep functioning when everything inside feels shattered. There’s an odd stillness to it. The world continues to move at its normal pace — people laugh, cars rush by, conversations happen — and I’m aware of all of it, yet somehow separate from it. Even time feels distorted; days blur together, and moments feel both fleeting and endless. I’ve realized that grief isn’t only about missing someone. It’s about learning to exist in a world that feels unfamiliar without them. It changes how you see everything — even yourself. There are times when I catch my reflection and feel like I’m looking at a version of me that belongs to another life. This “out of body” feeling has taught me something about how deeply love embeds itself within us. When we lose someone we love, part of us stays suspended — caught between the world that was and the one that remains. I wanted to share this because I know many people who grieve feel this disconnection but rarely speak of it. It can be isolating, even frightening, to feel detached from your own life. But you’re not alone. This, too, is a form of survival — the body’s quiet attempt to make the unbearable a little more bearable. Grief doesn’t ask to be fixed or understood. It simply asks to be lived — even from a distance — until, one day, that distance begins to soften, and you find yourself a little closer to who you once were, and who you’re becoming.L

Out of Body While Grieving There are days when I feel like I’m standing outside of myself — watching my life unfold from a distance. I go through familiar motions: speaking, working, teaching, engaging with the world — yet it often feels as though I’m observing someone else doing it all. Since losing Sana, this sensation has become familiar. It’s a quiet disconnection that arrives without warning — a strange, almost surreal awareness that I’m here, but not entirely in the moment. It’s as if my body is present, but my mind has stepped slightly aside. In the beginning, I thought this meant something was wrong with me. But I’ve come to understand that this, too, is grief. When the pain becomes too heavy, the mind instinctively distances itself to protect the heart. It’s not a conscious choice, but a response — a way to keep functioning when everything inside feels shattered. There’s an odd stillness to it. The world continues to move at its normal pace — people laugh, cars rush by, conversations happen — and I’m aware of all of it, yet somehow separate from it. Even time feels distorted; days blur together, and moments feel both fleeting and endless. I’ve realized that grief isn’t only about missing someone. It’s about learning to exist in a world that feels unfamiliar without them. It changes how you see everything — even yourself. There are times when I catch my reflection and feel like I’m looking at a version of me that belongs to another life. This “out of body” feeling has taught me something about how deeply love embeds itself within us. When we lose someone we love, part of us stays suspended — caught between the world that was and the one that remains. I wanted to share this because I know many people who grieve feel this disconnection but rarely speak of it. It can be isolating, even frightening, to feel detached from your own life. But you’re not alone. This, too, is a form of survival — the body’s quiet attempt to make the unbearable a little more bearable. Grief doesn’t ask to be fixed or understood. It simply asks to be lived — even from a distance — until, one day, that distance begins to soften, and you find yourself a little closer to who you once were, and who you’re becoming.