Do you know grief math?

It's much less fun than girl math.

Jan 08, 2026

Quick note: Hello and happy new year! I did think briefly about writing an upbeat “2026, let’s goooooo!!” kind of post, but instead I want to talk about grief. Because the holidays and the new year always make me introspective, and I know they do for many people, whether it’s related to loss or otherwise. And while life is good right now and I am, in fact, very much looking forward to 2026, I miss my mom a lot. A new year means one more year she’s gone. I often wonder what she’d think of my writing, but I’m pretty sure she’d encourage me to go for it - to be open and vulnerable. So here we gooooo…

It’s January 2026, and I’m 33 years old. My mom died when I was 27 years old, six and a half years ago now… though now that we’ve turned a new year, it’s going to be seven soon. I’ll have to get used to that new, uncomfortable number.

I think often about how much time has passed since she died, a constant counting of the days, weeks, and months, at first, now years: it’s been three days. Two weeks. A month. Six months. A year now. Another year. Two years—how? Three, four, five years have passed. It’s been six years now…. Almost seven. That’s nearly 20% of my life she’s been gone.

This forward march of time keeps me counting. It keeps me engaged in a complex kind of mathematics I never wanted to know or understand. It’s grief math—a way of trying to understand your life after losing a loved one.

I was recently thrown into a new equation: how many years people have known me compared to how long Mom was with me. It came up when I was thinking about how cool it was that I’ve known one of my friends since kindergarten. We met at five years old and, if you do that math, I’ve known her—lived alongside her—for 28 years.

I only had Mom for 27 years. So I’ve known my friend longer; Mom precedes her friendship, but that friendship has outlived Mom.

The realization rocked me. Especially when I realized this number will only grow. I will now have to keep track of the fact that I’ve lived with people longer than my mom. Next year, anyone I met at age six (and still know) will have been with me longer than Mom. The year after, it’s the people I met at age 7. In 10 years, anyone I met at age 15—which is several good friends I met at camp—will have been in my life longer than my mom was.

This is grief math.

It’s a way to make sense of what happened. It’s a way to stay close to a loved one by relating your life to their death.

Grief math doesn’t always make sense

Rule #1 of grief math: it doesn’t always make sense to other people, only to yourself. There’s no real use for it, only heavy significance.

For example, other grief math equations I frequently run in my head include:

The proportion of my mom’s lifespan that I’ve already lived. I’m 33, and she died at 60, so it sits at 55%. One day, Lord willing, I’ll live longer than she did.
The amount of my life I’ve lived without my mom—18% now. That’s more time than I spent in either high school or university, and more time than I’ve ever spent in one job.
The years left I have to live without my mom—54 more years if I live to the average age of a Canadian woman. (Yes, I know she wouldn’t have also been alive all these years. Let me remind you that grief math doesn’t always make sense.)
The number of holidays she’s missed, my vacations and life changes she doesn’t know about, grandchildren she hasn’t met, birthdays she hasn’t celebrated, family dinners she wasn’t at, and too many more.

It’s a running ticker in my brain calculating the years gone, important events missed. It’s a constant tracker click-click-clicking along, trying to make sense of the passage of time.

Numbers are important in grief math, too. For me, it’s 27 (my age when she died, her birth date), 60 (her age), and the 24th of any month (her death date). Plus specific dates like her birthday, all holidays, my birthday, you know.

Grief time—an extension of grief math—is measured in relation to big events. I think about COVID-19 in relation to her death, since it happened 1.5 years after, and would have dramatically impacted her hospice care and our ability to gather for a funeral. I remember my trip to Peru in fall 2018 because I heard about Mom’s cancer re-diagnosis the day I came back. (That trip is retroactively tinged with grief because of this close association.)

Grief math is relentless. It’s constant. It’s not intentional, either.

There’s no part of me that wants to keep running tallies on how long my mom has been dead. It’s painful, it brings up a lot of existential angst… Just now, I’m thinking about turning 34 in a couple of months and how that was her age when she had me. But I’m not in the having-kids phase yet. Even if I were, she isn’t going to meet them.

Why do we become unwilling mathematicians?

In thinking about this grief math—which sucks, I should clarify if you haven’t picked that up—I keep thinking why?

I think there are two big reasons:

1) It’s a way to make sense out of something without any sense. There is often no sense in death. There’s no control in it. We have no say over it. We can’t explain it. I was powerless in Mom’s diagnosis, in her decline, in her death. But grief math helps us make some sense out of it all. It helps package things into equations, numbers, timelines—something that makes a bit of sense. It helps us organize our lives into pre-Mom and post-Mom. It’s not a nice way to think of your life, but it makes a little more sense than, “Oh yeah, she’s just gone.”

2) It’s a way to stay close to them. Perhaps even more than trying to make sense of something is the drive to stay close to them. The only pain worse than losing someone is the fear that you might stop remembering them. As the years click on, life moves forward. The grief certainly does not go away, but your life grows around it. And the intensity lessens. So how can you stay close if you’re not in the throes of painful grief? One way is this ongoing connecting of dots, ongoing counting of the years, milestones, and moments as it relates to your loved one.

Finding a sliver lining, if I have to

Grief math is so complex and devastating. It’s sad and dizzying.

But sometimes, just sometimes, it’s beautiful. Because that forward march of time that is so often painful is also a gift. It’s a gift to live and to grow older. It’s a gift to have time. The last six and a half years have been hard in so many ways, and they’ve been a gift. (Two things can be true at once, the biggest lesson I’ve learned in my grief.)

In the last six years, I’ve traveled, made new friends, started and quit jobs, lived through a pandemic, worked through challenges, put work into my mental and physical health, moved house, baked a lot of yummy things, laughed and loved, read awesome books, saw beautiful sunsets, cried and stressed, hugged the people I love, etc.etc.etc.etc.etc.etc.etc.etc. It’s an expansive list of life LIVED.

Because the six-years-and-counting since Mom died represent six-years-and-counting of life lived. And I think that is the kind of math Mom would like me to keep track of.