I lost someone I love, and everyone expects me to be over it by now.

Look at who is being addressed before you weigh what is said. The verses just before this one say the wise grieve neither for the living nor for the dead, and that there was never a time "when I was not, nor you, nor these kings — nor will any of us ever cease to be" (Bhagavad Gita 2.11–12). Read cold, that can sound like a rebuke: stop crying. But Kṛṣṇa is speaking to a man mid-collapse, and what he actually does is stay — for seventeen more chapters, taking every objection Arjuna throws back at him. If "get over it" were the teaching, the Gita would be one page long.

Notice also what the teaching is not doing: it is not minimising the loss. It is relocating it. The word for the wise here, dhīra (धीर), the firm-minded one, is defined by one thing only — na muhyati, he is not bewildered. Not "he does not feel," not "he has moved on." He is not deceived about what has actually happened. That is the entire claim: grief tells the truth about love, but it can mislead about loss — about what, exactly, has been lost.

Here is the verse's quiet argument. The person you love had, within one lifetime, several bodies. The child's body was replaced by the youth's; the youth's by the elder's. Face by face, the form you first loved disappeared — completely — and you never once called it losing them. Whatever it was you loved travelled through every one of those changes intact, and you tracked it effortlessly, the way you recognise a voice on a bad phone line.

The verse asks you to trust that same instinct one step past the edge of sight. Death, it says, is another passage of the same traveller — dehāntara-prāpti, the reaching of another body — not the annihilation of the one you love. The changes of childhood and youth were never changes in the one who dwelt there; the dweller and the dwelling were always two. You have first-person evidence, a whole lifetime of it. The wise are not people who feel less. They are people who refuse to be tricked into thinking love's object was the body's stages all along.

And notice what this does to other people's timelines. "You should be over it by now" measures the only thing an outsider can see — your functioning, your ability to answer emails. The Gita never measures grief in months, because it is not measuring your performance; it is correcting your ontology. There is no verse in which mourning expires. The dhīra is where the road arrives, not a toll gate at its entrance.

Stop performing recovery once. Choose the one person who can bear it and say the true sentence: "I'm not over it, and I've stopped pretending to be." Grief that has to be hidden does double work — the hurting, plus the acting. Put half of it down.

Then do one act of care in their name. The old commentaries on this passage make a startlingly practical point: grief, by itself, helps neither the one who is gone nor the ones still here — but care does. So cook the dish they always made. Finish one small thing they left unfinished. Ring the person they would have rung. This is not "moving on"; it is love changing address, from ache to action — which is the Gita's whole direction of travel.

Last, say their name aloud this week — one story, told to someone who never met them, in the present tense of love: "she always," "he loves." You are not deluded for feeling they are still real. By this verse's account, that feeling is the most accurate thing about you. What the timeline-keepers call "failing to move on" may simply be that you have not agreed to call the traveller by the name of the body they set down.