Someone may have told you that you should be grateful. That they lived as long as they did. That you had the time together that you had. That at least they are not suffering anymore. And while these things may be true, they may have landed wrong — as though gratitude and grief are meant to cancel each other out, as though being grateful should quiet the ache of loss.
They do not cancel each other out. And they do not need to.
Gratitude and grief are not opposites. They are two honest responses to the same thing: having loved someone. The grief is real because what you had was real. And the gratitude — for the time, for the love, for the specific person they were in your specific life — can also be real without diminishing the pain of their absence.
Some people find that grief eventually opens into a deep well of gratitude. Not immediately — this is not something that happens in the first weeks or months, and anyone who tells you it should is moving too fast. But in time, the loss can make vivid what was there. The particular quality of their laugh. The things only they knew to do. The shape of the relationship, in all its complexity. These things become precious in memory in a way they are sometimes not when they are still present.
Gratitude in grief is not about performing acceptance or arriving at a "better" emotional place. It is about discovering that love, even lost love, is a source. That having loved someone, even someone who is gone, is not only a wound. It is also an inheritance. The ways they shaped you. The things they taught you. The memories that belong to you now and cannot be taken away.
If you find yourself feeling grateful alongside the grief, let that be. It is not disloyal to the depth of your loss. It is evidence of what the relationship meant. And if gratitude does not come for a long time, that is okay too. Grief has its own timeline, and gratitude, when it arrives, will find its own way in.