Dad's post on the 10th anniversary of his son's death urges people to get more honest about grief.

Grief is a complicated web of emotions that looks and feels different for every person and each loss. While some cultures are open about addressing the inevitability of death, the United States is deeply repressed about facing loss head-on, at least in our public cultural awareness.

When someone loses a loved one it's par for the course to send flowers, meals, and words of comfort and condolence for months following the loss. But in general, it's uncommon to create space for people to dive into the memories of their loved one long beyond the funeral experience. In part, this is because of a general cultural discomfort with the process of slowing down to think about mortality.

But also, there is an unrealistic notion of grief being this linear straight-forward process, that someone will be sadder right after the death and the sadness will fade away with the years, vs the reality of there being ebbs and flows and memory triggers.