Kelly Rizzo is learning that grief does not end when the world decides it should. Almost five years after the death of her husband, beloved comedian and actor Bob Saget, Rizzo is opening up about the strange, unvarnished reality of mourning. On Thursday, October ? she took to Instagram to share something not neat or tidy, but deeply honest: a list of “weird things about grief” that she has lived through since Saget died suddenly in January, ? His death was later confirmed as the result of blunt head trauma from an accidental fall, leaving family, friends, and millions of fans in shock. For Rizzo, the grief has been anything but straightforward. She titled her reflections from the heart, anda caption she invited other mourners to add their own experiences, writing that grief “morphs and changes forms and evolves over time. It’s always still there. It just has different personalities from month to month and year to year.” In doing so, she captured something essential about loss:that it is not a problem to solve but a presence to learn to carry, one that keeps shifting underneath you no matter how much time passes.
Rizzo’s words are especially resonant because she does not pretend to have mastered her sorrow, nor does she offer easy answers. Instead, she holds space for the contradictions that define living without someone you love, showing that even five years later, grief can still feel as raw and bewildering as it did in those first impossible days.
The first item on Rizzo’s list was perhaps the most quietly devastating: “I’m still coming to terms with the fact that there will never be another new photo of him.” That simple sentence speaks volumes about how the human heart grapples with finality. It is one thing to know intellectually that someone is gone; it is quite another to realize, again and again, that the world has stopped producing new snapshots of them, that their face will never appear in a fresh image taken a week from Tuesday or a happy moment not yet lived. Every photograph we have of someone we love becomes a fixed artifact, a frozen fragment of time, and that permanence is both precious and painful. Rizzo’s honesty here touches a universal truth:grief is often less about single dramatic moments than about these small, recurring collisions with absence. The camera roll stops updating. The contact name remains unchanged, aid somehow no new messages will ever arrivefrom it. Even as life moves forward and new memories accumulate around the edges, the love you carry for that person remains tied to a finite collection of moments, and your mind keeps waiting for another one that will never come.
Another slide in Rizzo’s post revealed a complex emotion many mourners experience but rarely speak aloud:“I still feel guilty for feeling happy.” It is a confession thatwill feel agonizingly familiar to anyone who has lost someone dear. When joy returns, it often arrives tinged with an unspoken question: How can I laugh when he is no longer here? How can I enjoy this sunset, this dinner, this ordinary beautiful day, when the world feels so much emptier without him? Grief science has long recognized this phenomenon, this survivor’s guilt of the heart, but that intellectual understanding does little to quiet the sharp whisper that says contentment is somehow a betrayal. Rizzo’s candor reminds us that happiness after loss is not an insult to the person who died; it is actually a continuation of the life they wanted for you, and yet, she shows usthat even the most reasonable truth cannot always tame the irrational knot in your chest. She also confessed that“the crying still shows up at the weirdest times,” which will come as relief to anyone who has ever been ambushed by tears in a grocery store, at a red light, or while hearing a song on the radio that had long been forgotten. Grief does not keep an appointment book; it arrives without warning, often when you least expect it, and Rizzo’s willingness to document that is a giftto others who feel embarrassed by their own sudden tears.
Rizzo went further, sharing a self-critical thought that gets at the heart of how we measure loss:“Sometimes I catch myself thinking my grief counts less because I only knew Bob for six years.” This is a painfully common habit among mourners, who often minimize their own sorrow by comparing the length of their relationship, the intensity of their loss, ortheir right to grieve at all. Why should one person’s love weigh more than another’s because it lasted six years rather than six decades? Yet the mind does these calculations anyway, especially when you are surrounded by people who knew the deceased longer, loved them louder, or seem to be carrying their pain differently. Rizzo’s admission is a powerful reminder that grief is not a contest with scorekeeping; it is a deeply personal experience shaped by intimacy, not chronology. Someone can transform your life in six years just as profoundly as someone else can in sixty, and the depth of your love cannot be measured by a calendar. She also confessed to another uncomfortable impulse:judging how other people grieve. She shared that when she heard about someone dating again after only two months, her first instinct was to think,“That’s too soon!”—and then immediately caught herself, realizing how off-limits that judgment really is. This moment of self-awareness is so human, so honest,and so refreshing. Grief makes us all a little possessive, a little eager to categorise what is appropriate, but the truth is that everyone’s mourning follows its own rhythm, and no one has the right to dictate another person’s timeline for healing, love, or moving forward.
Rizzo’s reflections also touched on less painful but equally strange aspects of life after loss:the way time collapses and rearranges itself around someone who is gone. She noted that“dreams don’t follow a timeline. I didn’t dream about Bob really for years, and I had my first significant dream about him just this year.” Something about that felt mysterious to her, as if grief had buried a door and then, unexpectedly, opened it again from the other side. Dreams of the deceased are notoriously vivid and emotionally potent, often arriving long after you stopped consciously waiting for them, and Rizzo’s experience reminds us that the psyche works on its own schedule. Likewise, she described her life now as divided into two eras, with a phrase that is both ache and clarity:“Your life is divided into before and after. BBD and ABD (Before Bob Died and After Bob Died).)” That marker is always there, silently orienting everything that has come since. The person you were before the loss is not exactly the person you are now, and yet you still carry that earlier self inside you, a little more fragile, a little more aware of how quickly everything can change. Rizzo also admitted that“small talk is still unbearable. You don’t have time for surface level stuff anymore.” Loss has a way of stripping away the trivial, leaving you with analmost allergic reaction to pleasantries that feel empty, because you know too well what matters and what does not. Five years after losing Bob, she still finds herself craving depth, craving connection, craving the chance to talk about the people she loves, not just the weather or plans for the weekend.
At her heart, Rizzo’s list is not about sadness for its own sake; it is about love persevering. She wrote, with evident determination,“You still don’t want them to be forgotten. Say their name, tell their stories, it’s so strange how the world keeps moving.” That final phrase captures the strange dual awareness of grief:the world does keep moving, and there is no pause button for other people’s lives, but for those who are mourning, it can feel almost impossible that everything around you continues normally when someone so central is gone. Yet Rizzo is not asking the world to stop; she is asking us to remember. She wants Bob Saget’s name spoken, his jokes told, his kindness recalled, his legacy carried forward into the future. That, ultimately, is what grief becomes when it has matured enough to breathe::not a refusal to let go, but an insistence that love remains worthy of acknowledgment. Her Instagram post was a kind of quiet manifesto, a declaration that loss is allowed to be complicated, that feelings of guilt, judgment, unexpected tears, and long-delayed dreams are all part of the strange territory of mourning, and that there is no wrong way to miss someone.
In inviting others to add their own“weird things about grief,” Rizzo turned her personal reflection into a collective conversation, a shared space where the burdenof sorrow becomes a little lighter because it is carried together. Nearly five years after losing Bob Saget, she is still grieving, still learning, still remembering, and still loving. That ongoing process is not a sign of being stuck; it is proof that the bond between them wasand is real. Grief morphs, as she said, but it does not disappear. It remains, like a quiet companion that changes shape with time, sometimes heavy, sometimes almost gentle, sometimes appearing in a dream after years of silence, sometimes surfacing in a sob after a moment of pure happiness. Kelly Rizzo’s honesty gives us all permission to feel whatever we feel, without apology,and to believe that loving someone, and losing them, and carrying them with us forever, is perhaps the most human thing there is.
