The Ache for "The Old Days" (and What Grief Does With It)

There’s a specific kind of homesickness that has nothing to do with a place. It’s the ache for a time, and our loved ones being alive within it.

There’s a specific kind of homesickness that has nothing to do with a place.

It’s the ache for a time, and our loved ones being alive within it. The Tuesday you didn’t know was the last easy Tuesday you’d have. The version of your life before the phone call, before the diagnosis, or before the funeral home asked you to pick a casket or urn (that was the most surreal part for my dad and I after my mom died). You’d give almost anything to go back. Not even to fix anything, necessarily, just to sit in it again for five more minutes.

I know that ache intimately. I lost my mom in December 2019 and my dad around six months later, in July 2020, both to cancer. I’m an only child, so when they died, the family I grew up in of just us three and our Bichon Frise—the one that made sense of who I was—went with them. What was left was a version of “the old days” I couldn’t get back to no matter how hard I tried. And trust me, I tried. I’d watch family videos, re-read their old texts, listen to voicemails, and would just daydream about my childhood. A childhood I was truly blessed to have, I recognize.

This is often referred to as yearning, as you may know. An important distinction is that it’s different from sadness.

Sadness says, “This hurts.”

Yearning says: “I want it back, specifically, the way it was”

I think that’s why so many of us find ourselves craving a slower, simpler time (I do, at least). Not just before our person died, but before we knew loss could do this to a life. We’re not just missing a person, we’re missing an entire era. The one where we still believed we had time.

It’s Not Always the Past We’re Missing, It’s the Proof

Here’s something I’ve noticed, both in my own grief and in the hundreds of grievers I’ve talked to since: we don’t only crave the old days themselves. We crave the proof that they happened. Something we can hold. Something slower than a text message and more permanent than a story we tell ourselves that gets a little blurrier every year.

I felt this hard more recently, when my cousin found a stack of letters my dad had written to my grandparents while he was in the army. Updates on his day, a line about missing home or asking them to say hello to his siblings… simple things. But seeing those pages, my dad wasn’t gone for a minute. His handwriting was right there in my hands. That’s the thing about grief and nostalgia: they’re both looking for something tangible to hold onto in a life that suddenly feels made of nothing but memory.

Why This Longing Isn’t a Setback

If you’re in the thick of missing “how things used to be,” I want to gently push back on the idea that this means you’re stuck. I’m trying to get away from using the word “stuck”, but bear with me.

Longing for the old days isn’t the opposite of healing, it’s often part of it. It means you’re still in a relationship with what you lost. You’re not required to stop wanting the old days in order to move forward in your grief. Those two things can coexist, even when it feels like they’re pulling you in opposite directions.

What I’ve found actually helps isn’t forcing yourself to “let go” of that craving. It’s finding small, tactile ways to honor it. A ritual, a handwritten note, setting time aside to journal, a slower Sunday instead of getting caught up scrolling. Little anchors that don’t replace what you lost, but remind you that you’re allowed to carry pieces of the old days forward with you, even as you build something new.

This idea that a slower, more tangible way of connecting could actually help people process grief became personal enough to me that I built something around it: a project called Letters of Light. A monthly letter, affirmation card, and reflection card that I send to fellow grievers that was inspired by those letters of my dad’s that he wrote to his parents, but also me craving a slower, more intentional life.

And honestly, growing up as a 90s kid without all the technology and AI we have now, I desperately wanted to bring that back in some way. If that kind of tactile, old-school comfort sounds appealing, you can find it at lossesbecomegains.com/letters. But whether or not that’s your thing, the bigger point stands on its own.

Where That Leaves Us

We can’t give ourselves back those old days. Baking or going on walks with my mom, conversations or father/daughter trips with my dad, and the version of me who still had two parents to call. But I don’t think that longing ever fully goes away, and I’ve stopped expecting it to.

What changes, over time, is what you do with it. You stop treating it as proof that you’re failing to move on, and start treating it as proof of how deeply you loved and are so blessed to have a past to miss that much. I know all too well that isn’t the case for so many people.

But that ache for a simpler, slower time before the loss? That’s not a flaw in your healing. It’s a natural part of the process, and it’s completely valid to feel. What I’ve found is I can now hold space differently (at least better than I used to). Space and appreciation for the past and the beautiful, tender memories that holds, but also excitement and anticipation for a future where joy and hope can exist.

A Gentle Practice

I encourage you to sit with this and think about what that could look like for you, and how you can invite that in. For me, prompted journaling each morning and evening was a really impactful way of cracking this door open. I would write three things I was grateful for that day (which was really difficult some days, let me tell you). Three things that went well that day. A quick mantra to keep in mind, things along those lines.

Reflecting on things like this were small, manageable ways I could begin to envision a life beyond just the grief. It wasn’t some monumental shift with an “aha” moment, but it did disrupt any ruminating thoughts and negative thought patterns. Ones that were keeping me in the past in a way that was beyond just thinking fondly of that simpler life.

So I ask you: what ways can you bring that slower, more intentional, thoughtful energy into your life each day moving forward? If you’ve experienced loss, you know how precious our time. Perhaps it’s even clearer to you know (or it’s becoming clearer by the day) what you do want or hope for, what you don’t, and ways you simply can’t settle anymore. If there were ways you were doing that in the “old days”, consider this your invitation to make some gentle changes in the new days ahead. You never know how it may transform your life as you move forward.

xx, Tara