Everyone has an Eeyore

I posted a TikTok with Eeyore the other day. It bought back memories of the floppy, blue-grey donkey I bought when I was pregnant with Grayden, the one who ended up belonging to Kahlia for twenty-three years.
The one who survived everything… until the fire.

I wasn’t expecting it to hit me.
It was just a clip. A sound. A moment.

But grief has a way of waiting for the exact moment you think you’re safe, and then tapping you on the shoulder with something gentle that feels like a punch.

The ache arrived before the realisation.

It wasn’t Eeyore I was grieving.
It was something underneath him - invisible, layered, ancient.

It made me think about the way objects carry our dead.
Not physically.
Not in a sentimental, Hallmark way.
But in the way certain things become repositories of meaning, holding pieces of the person we can’t hold anymore.

People talk about “triggers” and “symbols” like they’re opposite ends of a spectrum.
Like one is bad and one is poetic.
Like one knocks you off your feet and the other holds your hand.

But the more I live inside grief, the more I think that symbols and triggers aren’t different categories …
they’re different reactions to the same object, depending on who you are in the moment you encounter it.

Because the object is constant.
We are the variable.

Eeyore never changed.
I did.

There were years when he was just a stuffed animal in a child’s bed.
Years when I didn’t think about him at all.
Years when he was just something Kahlia tossed onto her bed without a second thought.

Then there was the fire.

The first loss.

I remember standing in the wreckage; ash sticking to my shoes, melted plastic warped into shapes that didn’t make sense, that awful smell of burnt life. I didn’t see Eeyore. He was ruined. Charred. A child’s toy destroyed in a very adult disaster.

But it broke something open in me in a way I couldn’t explain then.

You don’t expect to mourn a toy when your child is still alive.
But you do.
Because it’s never the object.
It’s the life it held.

And when she died …

This time, thinking about Eeyore I found myself mourning not just the object but the meaning.
The childhood.
The softness.
The versions of her I’ll never get back.
All gone.

A symbol becomes a trigger when the meaning becomes too heavy for your body to carry without shaking.

And a trigger becomes a symbol again when your love steadies the shaking.

It’s not categories.
It’s movement.

It’s the way grief transforms you from minute to minute;
how your body decides whether something comforts you or destroys you based on how close the missing is to the surface.

I’ve started to think that maybe the things we call “triggers” are actually the things we haven’t let ourselves return to yet.
Not because we’re weak.
But because the moment they touch us, we fall through a doorway we didn’t choose.

And the things we call “symbols” are the ones we’ve learned how to sit beside without breaking.

Same object.
Different version of us.
Different distance from the pain.

When I saw Eeyore on TikTok this week, he wasn’t a trigger because he hurt me.
He was a trigger because he reminded me of a version of her that existed before everything fell apart -
a version I can’t touch now except through the things that touched her first.

Objects don’t hold memories.
They hold access points.
Tiny portals into the relationships grief tries to rewrite.

That’s why they undo us.
Not because we’re fragile …
because the love is still very much alive.

Everyone has an Eeyore.
A thing that feels stupid to explain because it makes no sense that it hurts as much as it does.
A thing that carries a whole person in a way no one else can see.

Grief attaches itself to the smallest things because the big things are too impossible to hold all at once.

I used to feel embarrassed when something small broke me open.
Now I think it means this:
Part of me is still capable of remembering the living version of her …. not just the ending.

And maybe that’s what these objects are.
Not triggers.
Not symbols.
But proof.

Proof that love leaves residue.
Proof that grief isn’t a straight line.
Proof that remembering isn’t logical or predictable or polite.

Proof that even what burned can still carry the shape of her.

If Eeyore hurts, it’s because he mattered.
If Eeyore brings softness, it’s because she did.
And if something as small as a toy can undo me, maybe that’s not a sign of brokenness at all …
maybe that’s devotion, disguised as fabric and stuffing and twenty-three years of her handprints.

Maybe that’s love refusing to die.
Even when the thing itself is long gone.