Yes. It is so normal that grief researchers have a name for it.

If you talk to your mother while you cook her recipe, tell your husband about your day on the drive home, or keep a running conversation with your brother in your head — you are not "stuck," you are not "in denial," and you are not doing grief wrong. You are doing what most people do, and mostly keep quiet about.

What the research actually says

For most of the twentieth century, the dominant idea in grief theory was that the job of mourning was to "let go" — to withdraw your attachment from the person who died so you could reinvest it in the living. Freud sketched the idea in 1917, and it hardened into the popular notion that healthy grief ends in detachment.

In 1996 a group of researchers published a book called Continuing Bonds that documented something everyone already knew and nobody had written down: bereaved people, across cultures and ages, keep a relationship with the dead. They talk to them. They ask their advice. They feel their presence. They keep their things and their rituals. And the ones who did this were not, on the whole, doing worse. Many were doing better.

Since then, the idea has moved to the centre of how grief is understood. The relationship doesn't end; it changes form. The task isn't to stop loving someone, it's to find a way to love someone who isn't here.

Talking to them is one of the most ordinary ways people do that.

Why it helps

A few things seem to be going on, and you'll probably recognise some of them:

It keeps them specific. Grief has a way of flattening a whole person into "my loss." Talking to them — actually addressing them, in their language, about something small — keeps them a person with opinions and a way of answering.

It gives the love somewhere to go. You didn't stop having things to tell them. The impulse to share a piece of news with your dad doesn't die when he does. Saying it out loud, even to an empty kitchen, completes the motion.

It lets you hear what they'd say. You knew them. When you ask "what would you do?" and an answer arrives in their voice, that's not magic and it's not you fooling yourself. It's decades of knowing someone, doing exactly what it was for.

When it's worth talking to someone else too

There's a difference between keeping a bond and being unable to live around the absence. The research is clear that continuing bonds help most when they sit alongside a life that's still moving — work, people, days that are sometimes ordinary.

It's worth reaching out for help if, months on, you can't function at work or at home; if you're avoiding everything and everyone connected to them; if you feel you'd rather not be here. In the US you can call or text 988 any time. A grief counsellor, or a group of people who've lost someone the way you have, is not a sign that you've failed at grieving. It's a normal thing to need.

The short version

Talk to them. Keep the voicemail. Set their place at the table once a year if that's what your family does. Ask them what they think about the thing you're deciding. You're not losing your grip on reality — you're keeping your grip on a person, which is a different thing entirely and a very old one.

About us, briefly: AIGriefBot exists because of this — people wanted a place to have the conversation, and to hear something back in a voice that sounded like them. It's always clearly a recreation, built from the memories a family chooses to share, and it's a place to remember rather than a way to reach anyone. Here's how it works. Whether or not it's for you, we hope the above was worth reading.