The box and the ball

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.”
~Edna St. Vincent Millay

Photo by Julian Böck on Unsplash

Grief is like a box with a ball inside.

A few weeks ago, my cousin sent me a social media post she had found that explained grief more fully than anything I had read before. Originally posted by Lauren Herschel on Twitter, the simple analogy her doctor used to describe grief went viral in 2017.

“So grief is like this,” Lauren says. “There’s a box with a ball in it. And a pain button. And no, I am not known for my art skills.”

https://www.simplemost.com/this-viral-ball-and-the-box-analogy-perfectly-explains-the-grieving-process/

“In the beginning,” says Lauren, “the ball is huge. You can’t move the box without the ball hitting the pain button. It rattles around on its own in there and hits the button over and over. You can’t control it - it just keeps hurting. Sometimes it seems unrelenting.”

https://www.simplemost.com/this-viral-ball-and-the-box-analogy-perfectly-explains-the-grieving-process/

“Over time, the ball gets smaller,” Lauren continues. “It hits the button less and less but when it does, it hurts just as much. It’s better because you can function day to day more easily. But the downside is that the ball randomly hits that button when you least expect it.”

https://www.simplemost.com/this-viral-ball-and-the-box-analogy-perfectly-explains-the-grieving-process/

“For most people, the ball never really goes away,” Lauren concluded. “It might hit less and less and you have more time to recover between hits, unlike when the ball was still giant. I thought this was the best description of grief I’ve heard in a long time.”