When I was a child, my father and I used to celebrate our birthdays together, which were two days apart. We did that for the last time when he was 45 and I was 12.

The week after our celebration, he went to work and never came home again. He had died suddenly of a heart attack.

My dad was a small town cop with 5 kids and 2, sometimes 3, jobs. He wore the same uniform hat probably every work day.

Even though his hat looked very clean and neat, it held what my nose knew as his scent. Shortly after his funeral, I went into my parents’ bedroom and saw it on the closet shelf. I took it down and hugged it close. Then I inhaled deeply. It had his own hair oils, his Brylcreem, Old Spice and shampoo, and the light scent of his skin.

I asked to have his hat and my mother gave it to me. When I was an adult, and was repacking some boxes , I came across his hat. As I was changing the old plastic bag it was packed in, his scent escaped.

After 20 years, my nose, my heart, my whole being knew exactly who that was. Even though it was made stale and very faint by the passing of so many years, this dearly cherished scent gave me a sudden shift to a safer time, of childhood and that last summer he was alive, before I had learned what adults meant when they said there had been hard times.

At the same time that I realized how innocent I had been when I had last smelled my father’s scent, I also remembered that he had kept us from being worried about hard times, because he was the same easy-going man through hard times as he was through the good times.

One whisper of his scent, even light and stale, had stirred all of that in me.

As the years passed, people moved away from my hometown, then I moved away from my old friends to get married, then a few years later I divorced my husband. During those changes I realized that grieving isn’t reserved for death.

A lover leaves you (or you leave), a child grows up and moves out of the house, a friendship ends or you leave a town that has raised you on its sights and smells. You lose a job or your business fails. A pet dies. Grieving can be for any serious loss. (The Latin word root for grieving means “to burden”. )

What we don’t often tend to think about, even when we’re actually in the midst of it, is that grieving happens to the whole body, and it happens with all of our senses. A grieving person’s body can become ill - nerves can carry loss as chemical stress messages, the heart can skip beats and the immune system can be suppressed.