Grief as Radiation: What Loss Releases Over Time

Grief as Radiation

What the Black Hole of Loss Teaches Us About What Cannot Be Measured

There are losses that feel like collapse.
Not just sadness - but a gravitational shift in the structure of your being.

These are the losses that don’t leave quietly.
They bend memory.
They ripple through identity.
They distort time.

They act, in many ways, like black holes.

Physicist Stephen Hawking once proposed that black holes do not destroy everything they consume. Instead, they slowly release information over time—scattered, fragmented, encoded in quantum particles. This became known as Hawking Radiation.

And maybe — just maybe —grief does something similar.

What If Grief Doesn’t Just Take?

What If It Radiates?

We often talk about grief as absence.
But what if grief is also a radiating presence?

What if the person you lost, or the version of yourself you can no longer return to, didn’t vanish, but began releasing information slowly over time?

Not as a clear story.
Not as answers.

But as:

• sudden memories you can’t place

• dreams that feel more like messages than imagination

• bodily reactions that arrive without warning

• realizations that surface years later, as if sent from the center of the loss

Grief, like Hawking Radiation, doesn’t return what was.
It returns fragments.

Any model of grief that promises return misunderstands the loss.
Nothing comes back intact, not the person, not the self that loved them, not the future that was assumed.

What About the Things We Can’t See?

In Helgoland, physicist Carlo Rovelli challenges a deeply held assumption in science: that only what can be directly measured is real.

Quantum physics suggests something quieter and more unsettling.
Some aspects of reality exist only in relation, taking shape through interaction rather than direct observation.

Grief lives here.

Not every loss can be named.
Not every experience can be timed, quantified, or compared.
Some griefs are never fully “seen,” and yet they shape us profoundly.

Like quantum states before interaction, grief can be real without being fully describable.

Some realities shape us not because they are observed,
but because they remain open to relation.

Waiting Changes Trajectories

In quantum mechanics, particularly in Rovelli’s relational view, a particle does not carry a single, fixed story of what it is.

Its properties exist only in relation to something else.

Before a defining interaction occurs, we cannot say which path a photon took, not because it is undecided, but because the question itself has no meaning yet.

Nothing needs to be seen.
Nothing needs to be forced.

Until interaction occurs, multiple descriptions remain possible.

This is what we call superposition: not confusion or anticipation, but a restraint in description—a recognition that some distinctions cannot yet be made.

Nothing collapses too soon, because nothing has been defined too soon.

What if grief needs the same condition?

What if presence does not resolve loss, but allows it to remain relationally open, held between what was and what can no longer be, long enough for something to take shape?

Presence does not collapse grief.
It prevents premature closure.

Premature closure does not soothe grief. It silences it. It forces meaning before meaning can form, and then calls the silence healing.

Waiting, then, is not passive.
It is the decision not to force meaning where meaning has not yet formed.

Humans work this way too.

Grief does not radiate in isolation.
It moves through rooms, families, systems, lands.
Some people carry not only their own grief, but the residue of losses that were never given time or witness.
Institutions that suppress grief do not eliminate it.
Cultures that demand silence do not contain it.
Families that misattribute inherited grief do not resolve it.

We are shaped not only by who has seen us,
but by where relation still feels possible.

A nervous system does not require certainty to orient itself.
It only needs the sense that connection could still matter.

We curve toward places where room has been made for us—
even if we never arrive,
even if no words are spoken.

Grief lives exactly here.

Not as error.
Not as fantasy.
But as relational persistence.

We wait to be seen as we are now
by someone who once knew us before the fracture of time.

And when that witness is gone, the system doesn’t collapse.
It lingers.

We keep arriving.
We keep orienting.
We keep waiting at gates that no longer open—

not because we are mistaken,
but because waiting itself has become part of our structure.

We do not need to be fully seen to be altered by the possibility of being seen.

The mind, like the photon, is relational.
It bends toward presence.
It organizes itself around the possibility of encounter.

And grief—magnificently, painfully—

is the persistence of that movement
even when the observer has slipped beyond reach.

Not madness.
Not fantasy.
A relational reality.

Presence

I didn’t arrive at this understanding alone.

My niece Jen brought me here—not through theory, but through presence.

In the midst of grieving the loss of her brother, our nephew Rob, she had a way of slowing the room down.

Of reminding us, insistently, that being present mattered more than saying the right thing. She showed us that grief does not ask to be fixed or explained. It asks to be witnessed.

Watching her, I began to understand something essential—though I could only recognize it years later, after she was gone, inside my own grief: that waiting with someone is not passive. It is an act that changes the shape of what is happening. That presence itself is a form of recognition.

She helped me see that grief bends toward those who are willing to stay.

Rovelli names it the riddle of quanta, how to speak of something that exists between states.

I’m not sure we ever learn how to speak there.
We only learn how to stay longer.

Jen seemed to know that, long before I did.

What Is the Information That Grief Radiates?

1. Parallel Selves

You grieve not only for who was lost, but for who you would have been if they had lived.

The conversations you still rehearse.
The life path you didn’t get to take.
The version of yourself that exists now only in potential.

These selves don’t disappear.
They surface quietly, in longing, in imagination, in who you are becoming.

2. Unlived Futures

Some griefs are not about the past at all.

They are for the child not born.

The person that left too soon.
The love not repaired.
The words never said.

Loss doesn’t only take what was,
it takes what might have been.

3. Delayed Realizations

Grief rarely delivers meaning all at once.

Insight often arrives years later, in fragments.
Not as closure, but as slow integration.

Like radiation escaping a black hole, these realizations are subtle, nonlinear, and cumulative.
They change you over time.

Important Boundaries

This is not a promise.
It does not return the dead.
It does not make grief tidy or solvable.

This is a theory, because, like black holes, grief exceeds our tools for measurement.

Each grief is singular.
No two losses radiate the same way.

What cannot be measured is not therefore meaningless.

This perspective does not replace cultural, ancestral, or spiritual wisdom.
Ideas of entangled grief and continuing bonds have long existed across Indigenous and non-Western traditions. Science is not discovering these truths, it is offering language our minds can recognize.

If this feels overwhelming, that matters.
Some frames are not meant for early grief.

That’s okay.
Trust your nervous system.

Why This Matters

Time feels distorted because something has broken.
Not you, but the structure that once made time reliable.

After loss, time no longer guarantees sequence.
Grief does not move forward. It circulates.

What grief releases is not meant to resolve.
It alters behavior, expectation, and memory without announcing itself.

Like a black hole, grief changes mass before anything disappears.
By the time it is noticed, the trajectory has already shifted.

This is not a misunderstanding to be corrected.
It is a condition that persists.

Grief is not a violent object.
It is a boundary condition.