There is a chair that used to be their chair. A side of the bed. A spot at the table. A voice that used to fill a room. A phone number still saved in your contacts that you cannot bring yourself to delete.
Grief has a physical texture. It lives in the specific geometry of absence — the ways the space around you has been reorganized by the fact that they are no longer in it. The silence in the house. The first cup of coffee made for one when you always made two. The sound of the door not opening at the time it used to open.
This is one of the hardest and most disorienting aspects of grief after cancer: the ordinary life you shared continues, but without the person who made it ordinary. The routines that contained them now contain their absence instead. And sometimes the absence feels more present than a person ever did.
Give yourself permission to notice these things without immediately trying to fix or fill them. The empty chair does not have to be moved right away. The contact does not have to be deleted. The side of the bed does not have to be claimed. You will make decisions about these things when you are ready, and not a moment before. Grief is not a housekeeping project.
Some people find it comforting to maintain small rituals that include the person who has died. Still making two cups of coffee, even if one goes untouched. Still setting a place at a family dinner on their birthday. Talking to them as though they can hear, because on some level — on the level of what we need — they can. These are not signs that you are "stuck" in grief. They are signs that the love continues.
And in time — not on any particular schedule, not because anyone tells you it should happen — the silence will begin to change. It will not stop being there. But you may begin to carry it differently, to organize your life around it rather than against it, to find that the space left by their absence has made room for something — not a replacement, never a replacement, but something that continues to honor the life you shared.