Love and Grief: How the Body Remembers

When the Body Grieves

Recently, on 50 Words for Snow, the podcast where my co-host Emily Garcés and I explore words that have no direct English equivalent, we spoke with Kacheve Stafford, who grew up in Trinidad and Tobago. He introduced us to the Trinidadian word tabanca. As he described it, tabanca is the profound ache that follows separation from someone you love. What struck me wasn’t simply the definition but the way he talked about it. He described people losing weight because they couldn’t eat, becoming physically diminished after a loss. Even when Trinidadians jokingly talk about having a “curry tabanca” because their favorite curry shop is closed, the joke works because everyone recognizes the same underlying truth: Longing is something the body experiences, not just the mind.

That conversation gave me a different way to understand my own grief. I don’t just miss Holly emotionally. I miss all the places where her body used to meet mine. My hand still reaches automatically to the empty space beside me on the couch. I still pause after the gate closes, expecting to hear the joyful scramble of her feet racing toward me. My body continues performing a choreography that no longer has a partner. For a fraction of a second each day, it remembers before my mind catches up.

What Love Leaves Behind

Emily ended that episode with a beautiful poem imagining an ancient castle feeling tabanca for the life it once contained and a kestrel mourning the trees that once filled an open field. The poem suggested that perhaps places remember, too. That perhaps longing is woven into the fabric of the living world.

I’ve been thinking about that ever since. About how our house remembers Holly. The hallway remembers the sound of her paws. The space beside me in bed remembers the curve of her little body. Even the quiet moments of the day seem to remember when she would have wandered into the room, asking for dinner, asking to go outside, or simply reminding me, by her unhurried presence, that there was nowhere more important to be than exactly where we already were.

Maybe that’s why words like tabanca matter. They don’t lessen grief, and they don’t explain it away. They simply give dignity to an experience that can otherwise feel lonely and inexpressible. They remind us that love leaves traces. It changes the way we move through a day, the speed at which we walk, the places our hands instinctively reach, the sounds we expect to hear. Long after the one we loved is gone, those small bodily habits remain, quietly carrying the shape of that love.