"Moving on" is something people say when they're uncomfortable with how long you're still grieving. It's not a stage. It's not a destination. It's just something people say when they want the grief to be someone else's problem.
And for men who've lost their dads, it arrives early. At the reception, sometimes. Before the casseroles stop showing up. Before you've even figured out the password to his iPad.
This article isn't going to tell you how to move on. It's going to tell you why that phrase is the wrong question entirely — and what's actually happening when you think you're failing at grief because you still feel it five years in.
"Moving On" Is a Metric Designed for Everyone Except You
There's a reason the phrase shows up so early in the grief timeline. It's not coming from a clinical framework. It's not rooted in how humans actually process loss. It's rooted in discomfort — specifically, other people's discomfort with the size and duration of your grief.
Grief is socially inconvenient. It doesn't resolve on a schedule that fits around holidays, workweeks, or dinner parties. When someone you love dies, the people around you want to see progress. Movement. Signs that you're returning to the version of yourself they knew how to deal with. "Moving on" is the language of that expectation. It's a metric for their comfort, handed to you as if it were a gift.
The research bears this out. A piece published by the Grief Support Center on the experience of adult children after a parent dies notes that many people expect the grief of losing a parent to feel different — softer, more manageable — because of age or life experience. It doesn't. The loss strikes deeply regardless. And the gap between what people expect from you and what you're actually living through is its own kind of loneliness.
For men, specifically, the pressure arrives faster. The cultural script around male grief is short on patience and long on expectations. Stay strong. Hold it together. Be the one who handles things. It's an exhausting ask, and it's applied almost immediately after a father dies — right when you're standing in a funeral home trying to figure out whether the mahogany or the pine is the one that would have made him roll his eyes.
Here's what nobody tells you: grief doesn't follow a timeline you agreed to. It arrives in hardware stores, in the middle of a drive, while you're watching your kid do something your dad never got to see. It's not linear, it's not progressive, and it doesn't care about the schedule you've quietly set for yourself. As one reviewer of the Dead Dads podcast put it — a listener whose father passed just before Christmas 2025 — there's an "and it's been…" that trails off. Because grief doesn't finish that sentence neatly. It just keeps going.
The phrase "moving on" implies a departure. A leaving behind. But that's not what happens. What actually happens is that you carry it differently over time. The weight doesn't decrease; your capacity to hold it changes. Those are not the same thing, and confusing one for the other is where a lot of men get stuck — convinced they're broken because they haven't "gotten over it" when the real problem is that nobody ever gave them an accurate picture of what grief actually does.
Read more about how grief reshapes your internal landscape over time in When Grief Gets Weird: The Symptoms Nobody Warns You About After Losing Your Dad.
The Hardware Store Moment
There's a specific kind of grief that hits you in ordinary places. Not at the grave, not at the funeral, not at the moments you'd planned to feel something. It ambushes you in a Lowe's aisle because you reached for your phone to ask your dad a question and remembered he's not there to answer it.
This is not a failure of healing. This is grief working exactly as advertised.
The Psychology Today piece on unacknowledged grief makes the point directly: unacknowledged grief doesn't dissipate. It lives in the mind and body. When it doesn't get expressed, it doesn't disappear — it just shows up somewhere else, usually somewhere undignified, usually when you're not prepared for it. The hardware store. The gas station. The first time you try to hang something on a wall by yourself and realize you've never actually done it without asking him what kind of anchor to use.
These moments are not setbacks. They're the way grief communicates that the relationship mattered. And for men who've been handed the "move on" metric early, these moments often come with shame attached — as if feeling something unexpectedly is a sign that you're doing grief wrong rather than a sign that you loved your dad.
You're not behind. The grief isn't malfunctioning. This is just what it looks like.
Dark Humor Isn't Avoidance — It's a Structural Load-Bearing Wall
Here's the cultural script around dark humor and grief: laughing about your dead dad means you haven't fully felt it yet. You're keeping things light to avoid going deep. You're using humor as a defense mechanism, a way of skating around the real pain.
The reality is almost the exact opposite.
In the blog post "Humor as a Handrail" on the Dead Dads site, the writer is direct: "I use humor as armor. Sometimes it works." The piece describes walking into a funeral home to see a father before cremation — a kind and precise funeral director, a small room, a family. And in that context, humor isn't a way of avoiding the room. It's a way of surviving it. It's what lets you stay in the room at all.
That's the distinction that gets lost when people talk about dark humor and grief. Nobody is laughing instead of feeling it. They're laughing while feeling it. The two aren't in competition. For a lot of men, the joke is the only vehicle that gets the grief out of the body. Grief spoken plainly often lands nowhere. The same grief, held in a joke, can travel. Can land. Can let someone else say "yeah, exactly."
The "Why Dark Humor Helps When You're Grieving" episode addresses this directly. It's not a workaround. It's a mechanism. And it's one that men in particular tend to reach for — partly because straight-line emotional expression is often the thing they've been least trained to do, partly because humor creates enough structural distance to let you look at something you couldn't otherwise face head-on.
Think of it like squinting into the sun. You can't look directly at some grief. The humor is the squint. It lets you see it.
For a deeper look at why this is actually how the brain works — not just how men cope — see Why Your Brain Needs the Laugh: The Neuroscience of Gallows Humor and Grief.
The Dairy Queen Tradition
One of the most honest illustrations of this comes from the Dead Dads blog post "Dairy Queen or Bust". The question at the center of it is almost absurdly simple: how do you celebrate the death of someone? The writer's dad died five years ago, the kids were young, and what gets handed down — what becomes the ritual — is a trip to Dairy Queen.
Not a solemn ceremony. Not a formal remembrance. Ice cream.
But here's the thing about that ritual: it works. The kids connect to their grandfather through it. It's repeatable. It's real. It doesn't require them to have a vocabulary for grief they don't have yet. It just requires that someone shows up, buys a Blizzard, and says something like "this was his thing."
Grief rituals don't have to be solemn to be real. The Dairy Queen trip is exactly as meaningful as a formal memorial. Maybe more, because the kids will actually remember it. They'll carry it. And when they're old enough to understand what they were actually doing, they'll understand that grief can have ice cream in it and still count.
This is what resilience looks like — not the clean, upward-trending version that fits the "moving on" metric, but the messy, ongoing, sometimes funny version that looks like making it to next Tuesday and finding a reason to go for soft-serve in the meantime.
What Actually Happens Instead of Moving On
You don't move on. Here's what you actually do.
You get more practiced at holding the weight. The grief doesn't shrink — your strength grows around it. You develop a vocabulary for the unexpected moments. You learn to recognize the hardware store feeling before it completely blindsides you, even if you can't always prevent it.
You build rituals, even small ones. You figure out how to talk about him — or at least how to not completely avoid it. You start to understand that keeping his memory present for your kids is different from wallowing, even though it might feel similar from the outside. As one listener who reviewed the Dead Dads podcast described: it's the type of pain some men "bottle up and keep to yourself" — until they hear someone else talking about it honestly, and something loosens.
You find the jokes. Not because you're avoiding the pain, but because the jokes are where some of the pain lives. You learn that "closure" is largely a fiction — a word that sounds like an ending when grief is actually something you integrate, not something you finish. And slowly, unevenly, you figure out what it means to live forward without the person who, for a long time, was your model for what living forward even looked like.
That's the real process. Messy, nonlinear, occasionally hilarious in the darkest possible way. It doesn't fit on a greeting card. It doesn't resolve cleanly. And it absolutely does not look like moving on.
The Dead Dads podcast exists because Roger Nairn and Scott Cunningham couldn't find the conversation they were looking for — the one that told the truth about all of this without dressing it up or rushing it toward resolution. If you're somewhere in the middle of it, that's the conversation worth finding.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen — and if you've got something to say about your dad, leave a message at deaddadspodcast.com.