Posts tagged with “grief”
How I Rebuilt My Life After Devastating Loss
On August 22, 2018, my husband collapsed in our bedroom.
Rudy was my best friend and my partner in every sense of the word. His last word was “911.”
I performed CPR while my youngest daughter and my father-in-law stood nearby, and my oldest daughter shielded our four-year-old in another room. The EMTs worked on him before taking him to the hospital, and my father-in-law and I followed the ambulance.
After what felt like forever, a nurse moved us into a small waiting room at the back of the ER. There was no urgency in the building. It was eerily …
The Truth About My Marriage I Finally Had to Face
“You don’t have to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm.” ~Unknown
Tomorrow, a court will grant me a divorce after eleven years of marriage. I’ve spent the last several months rereading a decade of my own life like evidence in a case, trying to understand how I got here. What I found surprised me: not one dramatic betrayal, but hundreds of small moments where I chose to make myself smaller so the relationship could stay intact.
I met my husband when we were teenagers, through a mutual friend, and fell for him the way you fall for …
When “Nothing Is Wrong” Keeps You in the Wrong Life
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” ~Carl Jung
I was twenty-eight years old, standing in front of a mirror, reaching for my lipstick.
I couldn’t put it on.
I was engaged. A wedding was ahead of me. The invitations, expectations, and imagined future were already gathering momentum.
Nothing was visibly wrong.
That was the problem.
As I looked at my reflection, I could not find myself inside the life I was preparing to enter.
There had been no betrayal, no dramatic confrontation, and no single moment I could point to and say, “There. That …
How the People We Love Live On in Us
“What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” ~Helen Keller
Growing up, I thought my father was a pack rat.
He never seemed to throw anything away. Bent nails. Odd screws. Washers without matching bolts. Short pieces of lumber that looked too small to be useful. If there was even the slightest chance something might come in handy someday, he found a place for it in the cellar.
I couldn’t understand it.
Why save things you could replace for a few cents at the hardware store?
He would …
The Wholeness I Found When I Lost Someone I Love
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” ~Rumi
The room didn’t change when she left. The chair was where it had always been, angled toward the window the way she liked it. What changed was that I could finally see the shape of the thing I’d been leaning on, now that it wasn’t there to lean on anymore.
For a long time, I called what I felt “love,” and some of it was. But underneath the grief was something I was slower to admit. A lot of what I missed wasn’t her. It was the version of …
What Happened When I Finally Stopped Saying “I’m Fine”
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” ~Rumi
The first winter, I learned to lie cheerfully.
“How are you settling in?” someone would ask, and I would smile and say, “Really well, thank you.” That was the most fluent English I spoke all day.
I had left a warm, loud, crowded life and landed in a quiet apartment in a country where the cold did something to the air that made it hurt to breathe. I was a student, far from everyone who knew my name properly. I was supposed to be grateful.
And I was grateful. …
The Day I Realized Love Couldn’t Save Someone
“When it comes down to it, that’s what life is all about: showing up for the people you love, again and again, until you can’t show up anymore.” ~Rebecca Walker
The first time my dad admitted he was scared, I felt something shift inside me.
Not uncomfortable. Not worried. Scared.
He had recently been diagnosed with Stage IV colorectal cancer, and we were standing together when he quietly asked, “Is this what takes me out?”
I wish I could tell you I responded with wisdom or grace. Instead, I did what many people do when confronted with something they cannot …
How I Reframed Letting Go So I Could Move on from My Painful Past
We are truly free when we let go of the thought that the past could or should have been any different than it was. This is so hard.
The challenge is born from our desperate need to validate our feelings and experiences. It often feels like we are invalidating ourselves if we let go of the thought that the past should have been different. We have been through hell, experienced things most people don’t know about, and it initially feels so devastating to think of just letting it go like it never happened. Where is the justice in that?
I …
The Truth About Time That Most of Us Avoid Facing
“The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.” ~Oprah Winfrey
My father died at forty-nine.
I was young when it happened, still soft in the way grief makes you when you are not yet equipped to hold it. I was so consumed by the loss itself that I never stopped to do the mathematics of it. Forty-nine years. That is all he got. Forty-nine years to do everything he wanted to do, to become everything he wanted to become, and to say every word he still had left inside him.
I did not let …
The Small, Unexpected Ways Grief Stays with Us
“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it.” ~Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
My friend Diana’s WhatsApp profile picture is of herself hugging her dog, Zibby.
Every time her name comes up on my phone, there they are. The two of them in a tiny square. I’ve seen that photo so many times I stopped really looking at it.
Until recently.
Zibby wasn’t just a dog. She was part of the whole rhythm of their life, the mornings and the evenings and all the …
What Helped Me Heal from a Breakup and Create a Life I Love
“Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” ~Nelson Mandela
First, I slept in a snow shelter at -20°C.
Second, I stood alone on a stage in Montreal and tried to make strangers laugh.
Third, I stuck out my thumb on the side of a highway with nothing but a backpack and hoped that a stranger would take me home, 1,200 kilometers away.
I did all of these things deliberately, on purpose, as part of a project I called my Year of Fear. The idea was simple: face one new personal fear every month for a …
Growing Up Without a Family: From Survival Mode to Thriving
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ~C. S. Lewis
I started life in a poor household with one parent who left when I was very little, never to be seen or heard from again, and another who stuck around but made it very clear I wasn’t wanted and I had ruined their life by existing.
For some reason, I never had any contact from either of their parents, my grandparents, and very little to no contact from their wider families.
So, as a young child, I knew …
Gratitude: The Amazing Superpower Inside Us All
“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive—to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” ~Marcus Aurelius
Gratitude.
It used to be a very triggering concept for me, and sometimes it still is.
It’s been a process to unravel what it means to me and to be okay with days where I am in active trauma or grief, when I feel there is nothing to be grateful for. It’s okay to be in those places.
Gratitude is but one of the plethora of tools I’ve used to shift my perspective on …
What Losing My Brother Taught Me About Addiction, Shame, and Love
“Protest any labels that turn people into things. Words are important. If you want to care for something, you call it a ‘flower’; if you want to kill something, you call it a ‘weed.’” ~Don Coyhis
Losing my brother to a substance use disorder taught me things I never wanted to learn. Things nobody prepares you for. Things that will change you in ways you never thought possible.
It taught me that you can love someone so much it physically hurts—and still not be able to save them. It taught me that you can mourn someone you love long before …
The Moment That Brought Me Hope When Life Felt Joyless
“If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.” ~Buddha
There are seasons when life feels stripped of joy, when hope seems far away, unreachable, or unreal. Seasons when you wake up already exhausted, and it feels like there’s nothing soft left in the world—no beauty, no connection, nothing to rest in. I’ve been living in that season lately.
I’m losing my vision to macular degeneration. I’m a caregiver for my ninety-six-year-old mother. I’m navigating disability, financial strain, and the feeling that the future is shrinking instead of widening. Most days, I move …
How to Be Sad on Vacation
“Healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” ~Pema Chodron
I recently went on vacation with my partner, Jett. I want to tell you it was kind of a disaster, but the truth is, it was just life. I had a lot of expectations placed on this trip (I have a lot of expectations, period), and I thought my issues wouldn’t follow me to Mexico.
We left the chores and the kids and the pets behind, but we still brought ourselves. We were both currently …
The Beauty in Brokenness: Why Your Scars Make You Worthy
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” ~Rumi
On July 2, 2009, my life shattered with three words: “He is gone.”
I thought my friend meant my love was away on a camping trip, but no. She meant he was gone, as in forever.
My stomach knotted and my breath stopped. My body was reacting to the gravity of the truth before my mind could fully process it. The man I loved more than life itself never came back from his camping trip, and in many ways, neither did I.
My heart broke in a million …
