Grief is boring

Like anything that goes in for too long, grief is (I don’t know why people don’t talk about this aspect of it more often) unbelievably boring. I don’t mean in its earliest days, when the sorrow is too acute and the overall rearrangement of life too recent to allow for anything like tedium. Eventually, though, as you grow accustomed to its constant companionship, the monotony sets in. I can’t recall exactly how long after my father’s death this happened to me, because mourning also played havoc with  my sense of time, but I think several months must have passed when the grief that had sloshed around turbulently inside me ebbed into a stagnant pool. It made life extremely dull and it made me seem extremely dull and, above all, it became, itself, unbelievably wearying.

Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2022), p. 61