Waiting for Dawn summary

There's a specific kind of grief that doesn't get much airtime. It's not the sharp, clear grief of sudden loss – the kind that comes with social scripts and a general understanding that you're going through something. This is what Marisa calls Gray Grief: the grief of prolonged uncertainty, where things you once took for granted become hard. Where you don't know what tomorrow will bring, but you know it will bring some pain.

Gray Grief feels like an open wound that never quite closes. Cooking a meal without being blindsided by loss. Moving your body without effort. Working the extra hours you used to manage without blinking. All of it becomes complicated, unpredictable, exhausting.

Chronic pain is like a television left on in the background that you can't turn off. Focusing on the present only makes you more aware that it's there. It also creates distance – not because the people around you don't care, but because no one else can fully inhabit your particular experience of hurting. We all have different pain tolerances, different coping strategies, different physiologies. No one can tell you exactly how your pain should feel or how you should handle it.

One aspect of pain that surprised Marisa is that it introduced doubt into her life. Frustration and anger made sense. Despair made sense. But doubt? Where did that come from?

Marisa became a caretaker at thirteen, when her mother became ill out of the blue. It would take four years of gruelling appointments to finally get an accurate diagnosis: she had multiple sclerosis. 

Caring for others became central to Marisa’s identity – and her sense of worth. So when long COVID made it physically impossible to pick up her young son Bennett when he hurt himself, the grief wasn't just about the act she couldn't perform. It was about whom she feared she was becoming.

During prolonged periods of uncertainty, your priorities shift – and if your boundaries don't shift with them, something breaks. This is especially true for natural caretakers, people whose sense of identity and love is expressed through showing up for others. The risk isn't that they’ll stop caring; the risk is that they’ll give what they don't have, which produces resentment – and resentment slowly corrodes actual love.

Marisa learned this in the most visceral possible way. Her cousin Imani had been missing for six days. The family suspected she was dead, at the hands of her abusive partner. And there was a baby involved – Imani’s baby, who was in the care of the abusive father. Marisa's aunt Clarine reached out, hoping Marisa could take the baby in. 

Hope is the one thing Marisa keeps coming back to. Not as a soft, optimistic glow – that's not what she means. Hope, in the way she uses it, is closer to its archaic definition: a feeling of trust. It means trusting that something better is coming, and doing everything within your power to make that something real. That's not passive. That's disciplined, active, and often exhausting.

You don't need to feel hope every minute of every day – that's not realistic, and demanding it of yourself in a dark season is its own kind of cruelty. But the more you practice, the stronger the muscle gets. You learn to be in pain while still having the mental and spiritual space to take action. The two can coexist.