Time Heals All Wounds
Brian Sankarsingh contemplates loss...as triggered by a Reddit post
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I was browsing Reddit and came across this post. My consternation grew as I read each response … and as I write this, there are 883 responses. Having lost both my parents, I could readily identify with the pain of loss people were describing. However, it was the horribly shallow platitudes from others that triggered this article. The platitude "time heals all wounds" is one of the most hollow, dismissive, and intellectually lazy statements ever uttered in the face of grief. It is a thoughtless refrain, parroted by those who either cannot bear to sit with another’s pain or who have never truly loved deeply enough to understand that some losses are not wounds to be healed but absences to be carried. To suggest that grief is merely a matter of waiting for time to perform its magic is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of love, loss, and the human soul.
The first flaw in this absurd statement is its assumption that grief follows a neat, predictable timeline. There is a wound that scabs over, scars, and eventually fades. But grief does not work like that. It is not a broken bone that knits itself back together with time. It is an ever-changing landscape, a storm that may quiet and may seemingly dissipate, but never truly disappears. Some days, the pain is a dull ache; other days, it is as fresh as the moment the loss occurred. To claim that time alone heals is to ignore the reality that grief is not a singular injury but a lifelong recalibration of the self in the absence of someone irreplaceable.
The second idiocy of this statement lies in its implication that the depth of one’s sorrow should diminish simply because days pass. But why should it? If love is real, if it was deep, meaningful, and true, then why would time make that love any less significant? The suggestion that grief should fade is, in essence, a suggestion that love itself has an expiration date. This is not healing; this is forgetting. And forgetting is not a virtue. To mourn someone forever is not a failure of recovery; it is a testament to the fact that they mattered.
What time actually does is not heal but force adaptation. The bereaved do not "get over" their loss; they learn to live with it. They grow around the grief, like a tree growing around a scar in its trunk. The scar remains, but the tree continues to grow despite it. This is not healing in the sense of restoration but survival in the face of irreversible change. To call this "healing" is to mislabel endurance as recovery. The pain does not vanish; it simply becomes a part of who the mourner now is.
Perhaps the most insidious aspect of this phrase is the pressure it places on the grieving to "move on." By framing grief as something that should heal with time, society pathologizes prolonged sorrow. Those who continue to mourn are seen as stuck, unhealthy, or weak. But grief is not a disease to be cured. It is the natural consequence of love in a world where all things are temporary. To rush grief is to dishonor both the dead and the living.
The statement "time heals all wounds" is not wisdom. It is a cowardly evasion of the brutal, unending reality of loss. It is a lie told to make the living more comfortable, to sanitize the messy, truth that some pains do not fade. Grief is not a problem to be solved but a reflection of love that outlasts death. Those who truly understand loss know that time does not heal; it merely teaches us how to hurt in new ways. And sometimes, that has to be enough.
The Lie of Time They say time heals all wounds as if love were a scrape and grief a bandage But I have walked the ruins of my parents’ absence felt the quake of memory beneath years piled high like rubble mistaken for healing Time does not heal It rearranges The ache folds in on itself Stitched into the seams of days a shadow sewn into light Those who say move on have never held a hand gone cold They’ve never traced silence where a voice once lived They parrot comfort because they cannot bear the sharpness of truth Grief is not an injury it is a companion A shape you grow around like roots curling around the stone of what cannot change To mourn forever is not failure but faith A vow whispered into the void You mattered…You still matter Time does not grant forgetfulness It offers distance a cruel mercy where sorrow echoes softer but no less real And those who speak of healing like it is an end have not stood in the quiet of a room still holding a life that will never return No, time does not heal It teaches us to breathe with the weight to stand with the wound to love withing the absence And sometimes that has to be enough
Bio: Brian Sankarsingh is a poetic firebrand, a sharp, thoughtful storyteller who walks the crossroads where Caribbean folklore, social justice, and the human condition collide. He is a truth-seeker who questions political tribes, challenges lazy platitudes, and writes with a deep pulse of empathy, always pushing for nuance whether you're exploring grief, cultural identity, or the monsters that haunt cane fields and hearts alike. He blends advocacy and art seamlessly. He is part historian, part philosopher, part bard, driven by a hunger to illuminate overlooked stories and empower marginalized voices.
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