When My Body Was Supposed to Remember

A story about grief, cycles, and the sacred timing that slipped away

Grief doesn’t just live in the mind.
It lives in the body.
In the bones.
In the breath.
In the weirdest, most ordinary places you’d never expect it to show up.

Last night, I went to bed early.
I was run down — not just tired, but fully spent.
Four long days of movement, of doing, of staying busy — all caught up to me.
My body felt it, and I figured that was it. Just fatigue.
I had a few cramps, but brushed them off.
I knew I was getting closer to my period — but not that close.

And then this morning, I woke up…
and I had started.

It hit harder than I expected.
I wasn’t sad because of hormones (though Lord knows they don’t help).
I was sad because this wasn’t supposed to happen yet.

Ten years ago, when my mom passed, something strange happened —
my menstrual cycle synced with the date she died.
From that point forward, I started on the 14th of every month.
Like clockwork.

Not the 7th.
Not the 9th.
The 14th.

It felt significant.
Like my body had met me halfway.
Like it knew the second week of June would always carry weight,
so instead of giving me two weeks of emotional chaos,
it gave me one — a unified week of intensity.

And somehow… I liked that.

It felt like a strange kind of sacred rhythm.
A bodily agreement.
A weird, beautiful reminder that even when the world moved on,
my body hadn’t forgotten.

I even used to laugh about it.
My mom used to say she’d “haunt us” when she died — always joking, always dramatic.
This little sync felt like her humor showing up in my biology.
Like, of course she’d find a way to stay on schedule.

Over the years, my cycle fluctuated slightly — a day early here, a day late there —
but it always stayed within that week.
Always close enough to the 14th to feel like something was still intact.
Still sacred.

But this year?

This year was different.
This year, my body and my heart were finally going to be aligned again.
Perfectly.
Ten years since I lost her —
and I was going to start on that exact day.

It felt symbolic.
Like closure and connection all at once.
Like something in me had synced back up with something I hadn’t touched in a decade.

But instead…
I started early.
And that alignment — that sacred collision of memory and biology — slipped away.

And it made me cry.

Not because of pain.
Not because of PMS.
But because a part of me was waiting for that moment.
A moment to honor what changed everything.
A moment to feel like my body remembered the exact day my world did.

It’s wild how deeply we crave meaning.
How our hearts build rituals no one else can see.
And how even the smallest shift in those rituals can crack us wide open again.

Grief doesn’t move in straight lines.
It doesn’t honor logic or calendars.
And even after ten years, I’m still learning how to live with the absence.

Sometimes, it shows up in a song.
Sometimes, in a smell.
And sometimes… in the start of a cycle that came just a little too soon.

I didn’t know how much it mattered to me —
until it didn’t happen the way I hoped.

There’s no neat ending here.
No silver lining.
Just the quiet ache of a date,
and the strange, sacred ways we hold onto what mattered.

Until next time,
D