When Grief Changes Time: A Reflection from an Ed Sheeran Concert

On July 4, 2026, my husband and I had the privilege of seeing Ed Sheeran perform at Empower Field at Mile High—the stadium where the Denver Broncos play. Surrounded by approximately 70,000 people, I was struck by Sheeran’s ability to make an enormous stadium feel surprisingly intimate. Between songs, he spoke openly about his life, his creative process, and one subject that has profoundly shaped both his music and his recent years: grief.

In 2023, Sheeran released Subtract, an album born from an especially painful period in his life. Within a short span of time, his close friend and early musical champion Jamal Edwards died unexpectedly, his pregnant wife was diagnosed with a tumor that could not be treated until after the birth of their child, and Sheeran faced the strain of a major copyright trial. The album he had originally spent years planning was replaced by songs reflecting fear, depression, uncertainty, love, and loss.

Yet what Sheeran spoke about at the concert was not limited to the aspects of grief we usually expect: sadness, tears, loneliness, or longing. He spoke about time—and the strange ways grief can alter how we experience it.

He explained that it took him longer than he expected to begin truly processing his friend’s death. Intellectually, he knew Jamal was gone. But emotionally and physically, that reality took time to settle into him. He continued expecting to see his friend. Ordinary places, familiar experiences, and moments they might once have shared kept bringing Jamal back into the present.

That experience became part of “Eyes Closed.” The song captures the disorienting feeling of entering a familiar space and briefly expecting the person who died to still be there. Sheeran originally wrote it years earlier as a breakup song but reshaped it after Jamal’s death into an expression of bereavement and the way reminders of someone can seem to appear everywhere. At the concert, Sheeran also described the song with a sense of hope—the hope that, in some form or another, he might see his friend again.

Watch a video of this moment:

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/ff3cb3_47400d74f32544859931d51b15f04e0d/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

There are so many expectations placed upon grieving people about time.

When will you be better?

When will you move forward?

Why are you still struggling?

Shouldn’t you be back to normal by now?

But grief does not follow ordinary time and there is no "going back to normal." Grief changes us. A year can pass quickly while a single anniversary day feels endless. A memory can pull us backward so suddenly that the loss feels as though it happened yesterday. At other times, we may understand what happened intellectually long before the rest of us is able to absorb it.

This is because grief is not only an emotional experience. It affects the ways we think, remember, concentrate, sleep, move, relate to others, and make sense of the world around us. The grieving person is not simply waiting for sadness to disappear. The whole person is gradually learning to live within a reality that has been permanently changed.

Perhaps this is why Sheeran’s words felt so powerful in a stadium filled with tens of thousands of people. He was reminding us that even experiences that feel deeply isolating are also profoundly human. Many people in that audience likely knew what it was like to expect a familiar voice, reach for a phone, revisit a shared place, or briefly forget that someone would not be coming back.

Grief takes time, but it also transforms time. It teaches us that healing is not measured by how quickly we stop missing someone. Sometimes, it is measured by our growing capacity, second by second, to carry their memory—to close our eyes, feel their presence, and continue living while still holding love for the person who is gone.

Listen to Ed Sheeran's song, "Eyes Closed" on YouTube here.