bereaved mother – Page 2 – Words Can Express

On A Small Kind Of Magic

The next generation held gently in mine.

The house was full. Full of children, full of noise, full of that particular kind of wild that only happens after time spent on the shore of Lake Michigan. They were sun-kissed and overtired, yelling over each other in bursts of joy and complaint. One of the little ones had begun to cry—too much fun always spills over somewhere.

Amid the chaos, I sat quietly, holding a cup in my hands like an anchor. It was one of those moments where the edges blur and something deeper stirs beneath the surface. I watched it all like a woman half in this world and half in another—the chaos around me a blur, the stillness inside me something hard-won. I used to dread moments like this, where joy and absence collided. Now, I just breathe through them.

Gabriel was seated across from me, his shoulders soft with fatigue. Julia, his partner, walked up behind him and wrapped her arms around him. I heard them exchange quiet I-love-yous—just for each other, but not hidden. A small, sacred thing passed between them.

Moments later, Alexa emerged from the kitchen with something she’d made for Matthew. He looked up and said, “Thank you, love,” without hesitation. The kind of love that doesn’t need ceremony. The kind that has settled in, becomes part of the rhythm.

And right then, in the middle of the noise and the movement and the mess of real life, I felt the room bend toward something holy.

The sunlight, low and golden, flickered through the trees and spilled through the window, stretching across the wooden floor. And for a moment, I saw her.

My Becca. Smiling. Standing in that beam of light as if it had carried her in. I didn’t move. I was afraid if I blinked, she’d disappear. But I wasn’t afraid of her. I was afraid of losing the moment.

Her eyes followed the children as they ran and tumbled and squealed through the house. She laughed—not aloud, but with her whole face. I didn’t hear her voice, only the faint melody of a wind chime from outside, like a sound remembered rather than heard.

My breathing slowed. My heartbeat quickened. And then she turned to me.

That smile—her enormous, heart-splitting smile—lit her face like it always had. Like she had never left. Like she was just standing on the other side of time.

And then she was gone. But not really. Not ever.

Later, when the children had calmed and the night began to stretch out soft and tired, I went home.

Sitting alone in my room I thought: This is what remains. Not just the grief. Not just the missing. But this—the life that still surrounds me, the love that grows, the magic that still dares to show up.

And here’s the part I couldn’t have imagined, years ago: That I’d be able to see it. Because in the early years, I couldn’t.

Grief narrowed my vision to what was gone, what would never be. Every joyful moment was filtered through the ache of Becca’s absence. Her missingness sat at the center of every gathering, louder than the laughter, sharper than the light.

But something changes—not quickly, and not easily. And, more importantly, never completely.

Over time, grief loosened its grip just enough to let in other things. Love. Laughter. Sunlight. Not instead of Becca, but alongside her.

I didn’t stop grieving. I never will. But I learned to hold both truths at once: That she is gone. And that there is still good.

And in that moment last night—children spinning, love spoken quietly across the room, and Becca in the light—I didn’t just see the beauty. I accepted it.

Not as a betrayal of her memory. But as an offering she would want me to receive.

It’s not that the ache has gone. It never will. But it has made room. And when moments like this arrive—when love spills out of my sons, when my grandchildren’s laughter fills the air, when Becca visits on a beam of sunlight—I don’t brace myself. I open. I accept. And I thank her for staying near.

On The Death Of A Man I Already Grieved

Me, around four years old. Smiling for the camera while carrying things no one yet knew.

When my father died, the grief had already passed through me. Not the grief of losing him—but the grief of never having him in the way a daughter deserves.

The loss wasn’t new. It had begun in my late teen years, deepened in early motherhood, and sealed itself the day I realized silence and blame were his only language.

There was harm. He was physically abusive to me—not as a child, but later, as an adult. He broke my nose more than once. He choked me to the edge of unconsciousness. And each time, I was told it was my fault. That I didn’t know when to be quiet. That I pushed too far. That I brought it on myself.

And even earlier, when my uncle molested me, my parents responded the best way they knew how at the time. They found someone—a student counselor they trusted—and sent me to her. But it didn’t help. Later, when I sought true therapy as an adult, my father raged again.

“Leave the past in the past,” he said. As though silence could erase pain. As though survival meant forgetting.

And then, when Becca died, they swooped in — rushing to offer what they called help.

The truth is, I couldn’t help myself in those early days. I was drowning. But their help wasn’t comfort. It was control. The same old patterns, wearing the costume of concern. And soon enough, their version of help shifted into blame. They held me responsible — for her death, for how I had raised her, for daring to walk a different path than the one they wanted me to walk.

That was the final rupture. A day near the first anniversary of Becca’s death. The day I chose distance was the day I chose life. To protect my sons. To protect what was left of me. To begin again.

But not everything was broken. There was one moment I carry still — a memory that lives untouched by all the rest.

When Becca was born, I had planned to release her for adoption. I believe my parents thought it was the best choice. After her birth, she was taken from me immediately. My father never went to the nursery to see her — I learned later he thought it would be too painful.

But a few weeks later, when I chose to bring her home, everything changed. I rode back with the adoption agency representative, returning to my house in the deep cold of a Michigan January. And as we pulled into the long, snowed-in driveway, I saw him waiting.

He stood near the road, afraid the car carrying his granddaughter might get stuck or slide into the trees. He had never seen her face, but as he lifted the car seat from the back seat, he could hear her soft cooing under the blanket. The air was too frigid to pull it back, so he carried her carefully, listening to the little sounds she made as he walked her up through the snow.

In that moment, he allowed himself to love her. In that moment, there was only the simple, pure act of a grandfather carrying his granddaughter safely home.

When word came that his life was ending, my sons gently asked if I wanted to speak with him. If I needed closure. But I didn’t. The closure had already come—not in words, but in the space I had built between us. I think if you had asked him, it was they, my family, who chose to walk away from me. That’s fine. Maybe it was.

When he passed, a distant cousin sent a single heart emoji. That was the message. As I told my sons, my throat tightened—not for him, but for the ache of what never was.

There were no tears. The grieving had been done long before. Those were my son’s exact words. “You grieved him a long time ago mom”.

But as I spoke to each of them I realized this truth: They are fathers now—present, kind, steady. They are everything he could not be for me. Their children know safety. They know tenderness. They know unconditional love.

The cycle ended with them. And in them, something new grows: The kind of fatherhood that heals what once was broken.

Some grief comes like a sudden storm. Some arrive like a drought you’ve already survived. His death was the latter. But my sons — they are the rain that followed. Proof that love can grow where harm once tried to root itself.

And still — I allow for this:

I know his childhood was hard. Maybe he did the best he could. Maybe not. Maybe he simply failed. But wherever he is now — wherever we all eventually find ourselves — I believe the bigger picture is finally clear to him. He sees his mistakes. He sees mine, too.

And I believe this: Becca was there to meet him. Her arms wide open. Because that is who she is.

I hope he has found peace. I truly do.

On The Communion Of Grief

There is a ritual I have come to recognize, and hold dear, among grieving mothers. It is not held in temples or churches or under official signs. It happens in parking lots, across chipped coffee cups, beside hospital beds, in Facebook comment threads at 2 a.m. It happens when you least expect it, but it is entirely appropriate. It happens when one mother says the name of her child, and another doesn’t look away.

Most people do. They look down, or change the subject, or fill the silence with something too bright. I used to take it personally, but now I know—it’s not cruelty. It’s fear. Grief, especially the grief of a mother, terrifies them.

But every once in a while, grief finds someone who understands.

It happened once while I was working the front desk at the clinic. A woman I knew came in, usually bright and chatty, but that day she was unraveling—red-blotchy face, trembling voice. She tried to hold it together just long enough to buy flea prevention for her dogs.

When I asked gently if she was okay, she stammered. Quietly, like a confession, she said: I lost my son. He committed suicide.

Without thinking, I stood up and walked around the counter. I wrapped my arms around her, right there in the middle of the lobby. People stared. I didn’t care. She mattered. Her loss mattered. She needed someone to hold the weight of it with her, even for a minute. She needed to say his name.

I saw her again about a month later. She thanked me for my kindness, but more than that—for not flinching when she said the word suicide.

She told me how much it meant to be able to say her son’s name without watching someone recoil. I nodded, and told her what I know to be true: You deserve to speak his name.

She reminded me of something I already knew but needed to feel again: we carry the need to speak our children’s names like breath.

We tell the story of our child innumerable times. Again and again and again.

Sometimes I only say, “My daughter died in a crash.” Sometimes I say her name and let it hang. Sometimes, when someone really wants to know, I tell them about the poetry, the joy, the light she left behind. I remember one time in particular—we were on a farm, she was around five, riding on the back of a pony while I led it by the reins. I looked back at her. The wind was blowing her blonde hair, her head thrown back, and she was laughing—that laugh. A whole-body laugh. Pure joy. The kind of joy you don’t forget, even after everything else is gone. I want people to know about my daughter. Not just how she died but how she lived.

We are good at listening, too. Knowing what the other person is willing to hear. We don’t need to take that into consideration when talking to another bereaved mother.

With them, we don’t have to scan the room for exits. We don’t have to explain why we still cry years later, or why certain dates crush our lungs. We just speak. And they nod. It’s the rarest kind of ease. Grief without apology.

Not because we’re afraid we’ll forget. Not because we haven’t accepted the death of our child. But because the story is what we have left. It’s how we mother, now. It’s how we include our child in our everyday life still. It’s how we survive.

There’s a rhythm to it—an inhale when we say their name, an exhale when we reach the moment they left. Some of us tell it with clinical precision, like an autopsy report. Others spin it like poetry, fractured and strange. Some cry every time. Some haven’t cried in years. But we all need to tell it.

Because grief unspoken calcifies. Because their life deserves an audience. Because silence is too heavy to carry alone.

When another mother listens—really listens—not with sympathy but with knowing, something sacred passes between us. We become witnesses for each other. We say: Yes, I hear you. Yes, that was real.

Being witnessed doesn’t undo the grief. It doesn’t fix it. But it makes it bearable. It makes it human. It reminds me I’m not just a mother who lost a child—I’m still Becca’s mother. I’m still here.

We are midwives to memories. Midwives don’t just deliver—they guard, soothe, hold steady when the pain comes. So do we. We breathe with each other through the contractions of memory. We place gentle hands on old wounds to remind each other we’re still here, still real. We whisper, You’re not alone. You can do this. I’m right here. And when the story breaks open again, we help gather the pieces, wrap them in warmth, and say, Look. Look what love made.

And in the telling, a tiny burden lifts. The story never gets lighter. But we get stronger from the lifting.

And when I tell Becca’s story—when I speak her name into a world that keeps moving forward without her—I am drawing her back into it. Not as a ghost, not as a shadow, but as a force. A daughter. A person who was and is, because I remember.

Because I say her name.

Because I tell the story

And because I tell it, she remains.

On The Love That Outlives Safety

This photo was taken just hours before her life was taken. I share it not to mourn what was lost, but to honor who she was.

She was five the first time she disappeared. Just long enough for my body to forget how to breathe. Just long enough to taste what it might mean to lose her. I got her back that day. Years later, I wouldn’t.

I was at work when I was told I had an important phone call. Panic didn’t set in until the new babysitter said Becca had never made it to her house after school. This was a babysitter Becca had met her a few times. She’d been at the house once. She was to be dropped off at the front door by the school bus. For whatever reason . . . this failed to happen.

This was the first time I knew: the world would not keep my child safe.

Hurried phone calls were made. From the bus garage I learned the driver had not let my daughter off in front of the babysitter’s house as was the normal protocol. Instead, she let a five year old get off the bus at an intersection more than half a block from where she needed to be. The driver did not tell my child which direction to go. The bus door was shut and the driver pulled away. Leaving a scared confused little girl standing vulnerably at a busy crossroads.

All I could see in my mind was the smallness of a five-year-old girl and the indifference of a school bus door shutting behind her. My hands trembled as I hung up the phone, only to pick it back up and dial the police.

I was frantic. Words spilled out in the wrong order—too many at once, none of them calm. It took a full minute before the voice on the other end could piece together what I was trying to say.

Officers would be dispatched immediately, I was told.

But that didn’t bring peace.

My daughter had been missing for nearly an hour. That meant she’d been wandering—alone, scared—for far too long.

It was a teenage girl who saved her.

Walking home from school, she saw my daughter—small, crying, and clearly lost. She didn’t ignore the scene. She didn’t keep walking. She took Becca’s hand and walked her slowly through the neighborhood, up and down the streets, until they came upon the right house.

A police car was parked out front.

The moment they saw my daughter, they knew it was her. The clothes matched the description I had given them. A puffy pink winter jacket with fur. White boots. She was safe.

Later, Becca told me a man had pulled up in a car and asked her to get in. Said he would help her find the house.

She didn’t get in.

To this day, I don’t know if he meant to help or if something darker lived behind that invitation. I try not to let my mind go there, but it does.

Two hours passed from the time the bus driver let her off to the moment she was found.

Two long hours when it was hard to breathe. Hard to move. Hard to speak.

One hundred and twenty minutes in which I did not know if my daughter was dead or alive. Or whether I would ever see her again.

I got her back that first time.

I wrapped her in my arms and promised she was safe now. That I would never let anything happen to her again.

But safety is a fragile thing. It only stretches so far.

There would come another day. Another phone call. Another stretch of time where I didn’t know if my daughter was dead or alive.

Forty-five minutes. Not as long as those two hours when she was five, but infinitely heavier.

Because part of me already knew.

I knew she was in trouble. I knew it was bad. But until someone said the words out loud—until they confirmed it was her—there was still that small, desperate hope. The kind that gasps for breath. The kind that claws at time. The kind that doesn’t survive the truth.

I kept her safe when she was small. I fed her, clothed her, and taught her to look both ways. But I could not teach the world to love her the way I did. I could not make it hold her life as sacred.

I knew this wasn’t going to end like it had when she was five.

That night, unease wrapped itself around me and wouldn’t let go. I couldn’t name it, but something inside me knew: something was about to happen, and it would change my life. Irreversibly.

The call came in the early morning hours.

But before the phone ever rang, I felt her.

Becca sat on the side of my bed and stroked my leg the way she always did when she wanted to wake me gently. I stirred, confused—why would she have come over in the middle of the night?

I opened my eyes, expecting to see her. Expecting the outline of her body, the glow of the hallway light behind her.

But there was no one there. No shape. No shadow. Only the certainty of her presence.

I could feel her. I could smell her. She had touched me. And I knew.

I sat up in bed, searching for her. But I already knew I wouldn’t find her there.

The air was too still. The silence too loud. And then I looked at the phone. The message light was blinking. That blinking light. It felt like a countdown. Like the final seconds before the world collapsed.

The message was from my parents.

“Becca’s been in a crash,” my mother said, her voice uneven. “And it doesn’t look good.”

I would later learn that another driver had seen the accident and ran to help. He reached the car, saw her, and knew she was beyond help. She was already gone.

He found her phone and pressed redial. The last number she had called. My parents.

I can’t explain why, but I find comfort in that – that one of the last things her phone did was reach for the people who loved her. That someone was there, even for a moment, trying to reach back.

Again, I found myself in a space of time when I didn’t know, for certain, if my daughter was alive.
A stretch of minutes where I held that fragile hope like I had eighteen years earlier, when she was a lost child.

Hope is cruel in those moments. But it’s all we have. Hope keeps you upright, even when it rips through your insides like glass.

It asks you to imagine your child still breathing. And then punishes you when she’s not.

There’s something that happens to a mother’s body when she spends time in that liminal space. Between the not-knowing and the knowing. Between she might still be alive and she is dead.

It rewires you.

Something primal stretches thin. The nerves stay coiled. The heart never really goes back to beating in rhythm with the world.

After the first time, when she was five and lost, I learned that safety is a myth. That all it takes is one careless act – a bus door closing too soon, a turn in the wrong direction—for everything to unravel.

After the second time, when she was killed, I stopped believing the world cared about keeping anyone safe at all.

I walk through life differently now. Suspicion hums under the surface. Joy feels like a dare.
Trust has to be earned in ways I can’t always explain.

The truth is:

Even when everything looks okay – even when the sun is shining and the news is good and the children are laughing – my body is always half-ready to grieve again.

It’s not anxiety. It’s memory. A memory so deep it lives in my marrow.

Because I have stood in that unbearable place where a phone might ring and everything might end.

After she was found at five, I never again assumed she’d be safe just because she was supposed to be. After she died, I never again believed the world had any interest in protecting what I loved.

Grieving mothers wait. We wait for hope to return only to feel it slip through our fingers like mercury – impossible to hold. Impossible to let go.

I’m sorry I didn’t keep you safe my Becca.

But I never stopped loving you with every part of me that remains.

On The Things I Say Instead Of Telling You My Daughter Is Dead

Unfiltered survival. Taken on a night I didn’t know how to keep going—but did anyway. Image credit: Diane Neas

Note to the reader: This piece is about the coded ways grieving mothers speak. It’s about what we say to survive the unbearable, and what we leave unsaid. If you’ve lost a child, I hope this helps you feel less alone. If you haven’t, I hope you’ll read with an open heart.

I have a list of answers I give when someone asks me how I am doing. They vary depending on how close to the surface my grief is that day. Well, truthfully, it’s always just beneath my skin like a bruise that never fades. Press too hard and it pulses to the surface.

I say “fine,” even when I’m not.

I say “hanging in there,” even when I’m unraveling.

I say “stabilized, eating, eliminating”. That is considered a good outcome in the animal world.

I say “living, laughing, loving,” and you laugh, which is the goal—because if you laugh, you won’t ask what I really mean.

I have an entire vocabulary now. Most bereaved mothers have learned this language. One that says just enough to end the conversation, but not so much that it opens us wide.

Because the truth? The truth is that she died. And I didn’t.

And I still don’t know what to do with that.

So instead, I answer in code. I give you the version of me you can handle. I’ve learned to protect your comfort at the cost of my truth. Because if I told you what it’s really like…you would never ask again.

But I’m protecting myself, too. There are days when telling the truth would cause me to implode on the spot. Days when I’m just trying to make it from sunup to sundown. I’m not lying to you. I’m giving myself space to take a breath.

When I say “alive” I mean: unwilling to die even if I wanted to.

When I reply “functional” I mean: still broken but making it through.

When I sarcastically say “living, laughing, loving” I mean: I’m not doing any of those things right now. Or maybe I am, but not in the way you think. Not the Hallmark version. This is survival with a grimace, not a glow. This is gallows humor in a forced lighthearted tone.

So you can laugh, not be uncomfortable and I can stay hidden.

Most people don’t want to know that children die. That love isn’t always enough. If they let it in—even for a moment—it would ruin the myth that our children are safe. That we can protect them. That we’re in control.

As much as I wish that were true… it simply isn’t.

And that truth is so devastatingly huge, so unbearable, that most people have no choice but to ignore it. Because how could anyone live every moment of every day waiting for their child to die?

I live on the other side of that coin. I am waiting for my child to come back to life.

Child loss grief isn’t tidy. It isn’t neat. It’s infinite. All consuming. Not to say other deaths don’t shake us. They do. But the death of a child tears through the center of our lives. It shatters the order we were promised. The order we were prepared to follow.

And our society doesn’t do well with grief, either. Friends, neighbors, coworkers, even well-meaning strangers – they want us to be done with it. They want us back to normal. Quickly. Quietly. Without disrupting the world around us too much. Or, maybe more accurately, without touching their world for any length of time. As if, somehow, child death is contagious.

As if proximity to our sorrow might summon tragedy of their own.

We are the cautionary tale no one wants to hear. The proof that it can happen. The walking reminder that love doesn’t guarantee survival.

We are the poster parents for dead children. We are what happens when the nightmare doesn’t end, when there’s no miracle, no second chance, no waking up.

When the life you lived with your child has come to its unnatural end.

Then comes the quiet aftermath. People stop asking—at least, not in the way they used to.
They stop wondering how you’re doing in this new life. Because they can’t hear it.

To truly listen would make it tangible. And they don’t want to know.

To hear it again—to really hear it—feels heavy to them.
Too much.
Too dark.
Too real.

To ask is to invite the specter of child death into their lives,
as if their own child might be noticed and taken.

We are wreckage that still breathes. We are left in a darkened theater, the spotlight fades, and we clutch our child’s life story to our chest.

Still, we get up. We feed the pets. We answer emails. We smile at the barista. We make it to work. We carry our grief like an extra organ. Heavy, but vital. And we find strange, sacred comfort in others who carry it, too. Not because we’re healing, exactly—but because we’re still here. And being here means something. It has to.

Eventually, people start asking again – but differently. The urgency fades. The specificity disappears. You’re no longer asked how you are in relation to the death of your child. You’re asked the way we ask a dozen people in a single day.

“How are you?”

Like there’s only one possible answer. Like the biggest thing that ever happened to you isn’t sitting right behind your eyes, waiting. So, instead of being honest, we speak in our code. Speaking in code is its own kind of fluency.

And sometimes – on the rare, quiet days – we say “fine,” and it’s almost true.

Not because the grief is gone, but because, for a moment, it isn’t the loudest thing in the room.

And, that too, is survival.

If this resonated with you:
I see you. Whether you’re speaking in code or holding your story in silence, you are not alone. Take your time. Grief has no outline you need to follow.

On The Quiet Work Of Still Mothering

Mothering doesn’t stop after the death of a child. It simply shifts into a kind of prayer. We find a way to carry love beyond the edges of this life.

Their life begins with us in the most intimate way, and sometimes, it ends this way, too. Even when death separates us, nothing can sever the otherworldly tether. Our bodies knew theirs. Our hearts shaped theirs. That intimacy doesn’t end—it just becomes invisible to everyone else.

After she died, my mothering didn’t disappear. It just had nowhere to go.

I didn’t realize this for a long time. That deep need to keep mothering my deceased child was all-consuming. I went from expansive, all-encompassing mothering to the implosion of that care after loss—and the desperate need to put it somewhere.

Before, mothering was in everything: meals, plans, worries, dreams. Death collapses all that vastness. And when it does, the absence doesn’t feel quiet—it feels feral. This can feel like madness. It did for me.

Without knowing I was doing it, I began creating a space where I could still care for my daughter. It started with a simple instinct—the same quiet rhythm I once used to fold her clothes or lay out her favorite books beside her bed. I began gathering things. Placing them near her urn. Not with ceremony, just with care.

Little by little, a kind of altar formed. Not to worship. Not to heal. Just to keep mothering.

In my home, I’ve made a small altar for Becca. It sits on my dresser.

Her urn is marble—cool, smooth, solid. It rests behind a photo of her as a little girl, maybe three years old, with her sweet, mushy lips and soft cheeks. Just looking at it makes my heart skip. Her glasses are nestled at the bottom of the frame. A gift from a friend, the angels on the frame cradle her image like a relic.

To the left is a mason jar filled with fairy lights. I turn them on for her when the nights feel heavy. Behind it stands a white metal statue of a young girl with wings, a bird resting in her hand. My sister gave it to me, saying it reminded her of Becca. We don’t speak anymore, but I’ve kept the statue. Some things still belong.

There’s a peaceful Buddha head that sits nearby—not for religion, but for the sense of calm it offers me when I look at it. On top of her urn is a tiny ladybug house she received as a gift when she was young. Next to that there is a small smooth stone I brought home from Sicily. I know she was there with me.

There’s also a delicate, flower-shaped votive holder. I don’t use it for candles. I tuck inside it the jewelry I’ve been given by my children—gifts from the ones still here, resting beside the one who isn’t.

Behind it, there’s a tiny glass jar filled with cat whiskers. I can’t seem to throw them away. When I find one, I keep it. I don’t fully know why—but it feels like something sacred. Something she’d understand.

This is one of the ways I keep mothering.

I mother through my work, too—through the animals I care for, especially the ones who have been hurt or forgotten. I mother in quiet, invisible ways every day.

But this… this is different.

This is the intimate space between mother and daughter. The one place where I am still doing only for her. No one else. Just her. Just me. Just love that hasn’t stopped.

I’m not the only mother who does this. We all find our own ways to keep mothering.

Some visit their child’s grave weekly, sometimes daily, tending the space as carefully as they once tended their child’s room. I’ve seen mothers kneel beside headstones, gently scrubbing away moss with water and a soft cloth, whispering as they work. Sometimes they lie down on the earth itself—stretching their bodies across the grass, as if to wrap themselves around the child who rests below.

Others return to the place where their child took their last breath—a roadside, a quiet clearing, a stretch of sidewalk—and turn it into a sacred place. Flowers are left. Rocks are painted. Names are written again and again. These places, transformed by love and grief, say: You were here. You mattered. You still do.

These acts may seem small to outsiders. But they are essential. They give us something to hold. Something to clean. Something to protect. A place for our hands to go when our arms are empty.

One does not simply stop being a mother when the child is gone. That’s one of the hardest truths of child loss—we are still mothers, just with no child to mother in the ways the world recognizes.

We are left with silence in the space our child once filled. A silence so loud it can feel like it might break us. And into that silence, we pour what remains of our care. We light candles. We straighten photos. We gather little trinkets, or brush leaves off gravestones, or place our hands on the earth and whisper, I’m still here. I will always be here.

This is not denial. It’s not unhealthy. It is love, made visible.

Continuing to mother after death is not holding on too tightly. It is holding on rightly—to the truth that love does not end when life does. And so we build our small altars. We tend them as we once tended scraped knees and tangled hair. They are not substitutes. They are sacred spaces where we place the mothering that still lives in us.

And in doing so, we remember: we are not alone in this.

All over the world, in quiet corners and sacred places, other mothers are still mothering too. There are small altars. Sacred shelves. Sun-warmed headstones. Jars of buttons. Half-folded blankets. Unopened birthday cards. There are mothers who tuck notes into the soil, who leave offerings at crash sites, who talk to the sky in whispers only their child would recognize.

We each find our own way. We create places where our mothering can still live. Places where we can do, when so much was taken. Places where we can say, again and again, I remember. I still love you. I always will.

These acts may be quiet. They may be unseen. But they are not small.

They are the threads that keep us tethered—not just to our children, but to ourselves. And to each other.

This is how we keep mothering.

On The Space Grief Carves For Care

When I was told that Kimchi was coming in tomorrow for spay surgery my first words were: no, I don’t want to see her. My immediate reaction was to shut down seeing her again because letting her go had been difficult.

Kimchi is the momma dog I fostered after she gave birth at our shelter to seven puppies. She’d been surrendered because her owners could no longer care for her. In the immediate days following the birth of her puppies, five of them passed. I was asked if I would take her home, with her two remaining babies, and foster until the puppies were able to be adopted. I said yes.

Loving fully and completely knowing it will end in a goodbye is a bravely foolish thing to do.

Two days after she came to my home one of her babies died. A daughter. This left me with a petite dog who was fiercely protecting the one baby she had left. I understood why she couldn’t trust me. Why she curled protectively around her one remaining baby. Life is hard to trust when your baby dies.

Kimchi didn’t have to explain her grief to me. I was already fluent in it.

I recognized the wild grief in her eyes because I’ve seen it in my own. The kind of grief that makes you curl around what’s left, even if it hurts. I, too, am a mother who lost a daughter. I, too, once stood over a body that no longer breathed and didn’t know how to go on. So I didn’t ask Kimchi to trust me. I simply sat nearby, heart open, until she chose to.

Six weeks later I found myself completely in love with this little cream-colored dog and could feel my heart breaking as I drove her to the shelter to meet her new family. As I walked out of the visiting room, leaving her behind, I sat in my car and broke down. I told myself: you did it. You did what you promised to do and now it’s done.

I hadn’t thought about seeing her again, ever, but especially not so soon after saying goodbye.

Yesterday, I said no. I don’t want to see her. Today, I saw her.

When she realized I was there she became excited and jumped all over me. I scooped her up and told her how much I missed her. I knew I was going to break again when I said goodbye but I couldn’t help but feel joy in seeing her.

I didn’t want to see her. And yet I asked to be the one to recover her after surgery.

I hovered close as she went under. I needed her to feel safe—even in unconsciousness.

And when she came out of anesthesia—trembling, crying, her body unsure of where it was or what had happened – I was there. As I held Kimchi, I felt as if I was also holding the part of myself that woke in a world I didn’t recognize—one where my daughter was dead, and nothing made sense. A part of me that was in pain, scared, lonely. A part that cried out, just like she did coming out of anesthesia, unsure of where she was or why it hurt so much. I couldn’t comfort that version of myself back then—not the way I wanted to. But I could comfort Kimchi.

I held her in my lap like a child. Whispered to her like a mother. She wailed, and I spoke softly into the space between us.

I told her about her son. About his sweet, blonde eyelashes and the way he leans into people when he wants love. About how he is filled with confidence no matter what he is doing. I told her she made something beautiful, and that I had kept my promise. That he was safe now. That she could rest. I held her close and whispered all the things I once needed someone to say to me. You’re safe now. You did your best. You are not alone.

“You did good, Momma,” I told her. “Now it’s your turn.”

Her new owner was on his way to pick her up and I felt my heart beat faster. I had to say goodbye to her again and I didn’t know if my heart could take it. I told her how much I loved her and left her with one of my coworkers so she could give her to her owner. I was in the back of the clinic when she came slowly running into the room, looking for me. She’d slipped her harness and had followed me. I gently picked her up and returned her to the front. My heart aching all over again.

Why do we give ourselves over to loving a creature, a person, when we know it will end in pain. Yes, there is always the chance something will happen and an end will be forced upon us, but why choose it knowingly?

Because the love is worth the breaking. Because what they give us is more than what we lose.

Maybe the not knowing IS the sacred space.

Maybe that’s why I do this work.

I can’t mother Becca in the ways I once did. But I can mother the ones who show up broken, confused, too small for the world. I can be there for the tremble after surgery, the first safe sleep, the fear that softens into trust.

Maybe I seek them out. Or maybe they find me—these small ones who are lost or hurting. Maybe they sense something in me, some quiet knowing. I sit beside them. I hold them. I whisper that they’re safe.

Maybe it’s them I’m comforting.
Maybe it’s her.
Maybe it’s me.

Or maybe the lost and hurting find me because somehow they know I can see them. Really see them. The way I wish someone had seen me in the first days after Becca died. The way I still long for her to be seen, remembered, mothered—wherever she is now.

Every act of care is a whisper to her: I didn’t stop loving you. I just had to find new ways to show it.

All I know is that when I care for these fragile beings, some part of my mothering still lives. And it matters. The work doesn’t fill the hole Becca left. Nothing ever has. Nothing ever will. But maybe it gives the hole shape. Edges. Texture. A way to carry it without constantly falling in.

I used to think grief would blur everything—make the world dim and muted. But instead, it sharpened my sight. I see pain more clearly now. I notice the flinch that others miss. The tremble. The look in an animal’s eyes that says I need someone to see me. I recognize it because I’ve lived it. Because I still do.

Grief didn’t take my tenderness—it amplified it. It made me softer in the places that matter and fiercer in the ones that I protect. It turned me into someone who can sit beside the hurting and not look away. Someone who can say: I don’t have to fix you. I’ll just be here while you find your way back.

As I carried Kimchi back to the front of the clinic, her small body pressed against mine, I realized I wasn’t just saying goodbye to a foster dog.

I was saying goodbye to another piece of mothering.

Another moment of fierce, selfless love with no promise of return.

Another act of showing up for the scared and the hurting, simply because I could.

She buried her head in my chest like she used to, and for a breath, I let myself believe that all the love I still carry for Becca—the kind I can’t give her directly—was being received by this little dog who once guarded her son with everything she had.

“You did good, Momma,” I whispered again, unsure whether I was speaking to Kimchi, or to myself.

On The Sanctuary Of My Own Making

My inner safe place is often different each time I visit. The way it appears to me carries the nuances of where my mind is at the time. But there is one thing that is always there, no matter how my sanctuary shifts and changes: the memory of the first time I held her.

I wasn’t supposed to keep her. She was meant to be released for adoption. She was taken away from me immediately after her birth, as planned. But somewhere in the hush of the hospital night, a nurse — not knowing the arrangement — brought her to me for a feeding.

And I touched her. And in touching her, something deeper rooted itself inside me.

It wasn’t logical. It wasn’t planned. It was something far older than paperwork, older than fear. It was a bond sealed in the space between heartbeats, before anyone could stop it.

That moment created the foundation of my sanctuary. It is the place inside me where no one else’s decisions could reach. Only she and I existed there, beyond anyone’s plans or expectations.

No matter what other objects are in my sanctuary, this truth is always here.

It is my anchor.

Those first months after her death, I spent entire days there.

The first time I found my sanctuary, it wasn’t soft. It wasn’t comforting. It was a small, dark hole.

The walls were jagged — rough enough to slice open my skin if I reached out to steady myself. The floor was wet and cold, with no place to sit, no comfort to be had. There was no light. No warmth.

Just the truth — the simple, terrible truth — that she was gone.

Gone and never coming back.

The space was small, because that truth was everything. A single, shattering moment that collapsed the rest of my life beneath it.

But over time, as I began to see not just her death but the destruction it left behind, the space changed.

It grew.

It opened into something cavernous, and that was almost worse.

There were ledges, sudden drop-offs. Unstable footing. The air smelled like warm earth and something ancient — the faint scent of decomposing plant matter, like the forest floor in late autumn.

The sounds I made — the screams, the sobs, the broken words — bounced off the stone walls and came back to me louder than I meant them to be. They shattered against the cavern walls and tumbled into the darkness below, as if even my grief had to fall somewhere.

But then, one day, something shifted.

I heard a voice — a woman’s voice — echoing softly from around a bend.
It wasn’t calling out to me exactly, but I recognized it. Somewhere deep in my bones, I knew it.

It was her. The night nurse. The one who unknowingly undid everything.
The one who, by accident or grace, brought my daughter to me that first night.

She didn’t know the plan. She just saw a baby and a mother and did what made sense.

Her voice in my memory is gentle but clear, like light catching the edge of a wall in the darkness. I follow the sound through the cavern, around the bend, and suddenly — I’m there again.

Back in the hospital.
Back in that moment.
Back in the quiet where I first held her.

And that moment — that simple, sacred, accidental moment — becomes the first thing in the sanctuary that offers me comfort.

And it’s the one thing that is always there when I visit.

The first time I held her.
The moment I didn’t mean to have.
The moment I’ll never let go of.

Though there were times I entered the sanctuary and found memories waiting — uninvited, unexpected —there were other times when I carried them in with me.

Some memories refused to be avoided. They planted themselves firmly in my path, and so I picked them up and descended, holding them close.

Not just the worst memories — but the ordinary ones. The small, intimate ones.
Those hurt more, somehow, than the life-shattering moments.

A mischievous smile. A shared joke. Her voice saying “I love you” in that way that shattered my heart all over again.

Yet through the pain, I was learning how to be again.

Bringing memories down into that space helped me understand them better.
I would sit in the small places worn smooth from previous visits and cradle them to my chest. Places to rest — places where I didn’t crumble under the truth of her death.

I think that’s where healing begins. Not in the outside world, but in the stillness of rest.

And so it went, for years and years. Thousands of visits. Each one reshaping my soul, turning it — slowly, faithfully — back toward the light.

Grief made room for memory. And memory made room for life.

Over the years since her death, my inner sanctuary has undergone immense change. Years passed as the architecture softened and shifted.

As I changed.

Sharp edges wore down as memories and emotions continually washed over them. Towering stone cliff faces — once solid and impenetrable — cracked in places, allowing small beams of sunlight to slip through. The light reached the cavern floor and revealed things I needed to see.

But only when I was ready.

My soul allowed me to acknowledge what it could bear to carry, in its own time.

And then one day, not long ago, I noticed something new.

The gathered light — once scattered and hesitant — had begun to rise.
It spread upward, casting a warm illumination, and for the first time, it touched nearly the entire space.

And I could see. Not just the grief. But the shape of who I had become inside it.

Dozens of memories are nestled among the moss that now covers the stone floor and climbs up the walls. Not all of those moments are happy ones. But I am content they are there. This is how it must be.

I never want to forget anything connected to Becca.

More often these days, though, I see something new. Something from my life since losing my daughter. And there is room for those, too, in my sanctuary.
There is a necessity that they exist among the past.

My core self is still different every time I venture within. I think it will always be this way — until the day I am no longer here. Shifting as my relationship with grief continues to deepen and expand.

I am perpetually becoming.

Becoming as life draws me in and forces me to make changes,
and acknowledge there is still a future for me.

On Becoming Wild

Spring makes me sad, but it used to make me rage. Because what season dares to bloom when your daughter is dead?

Spring is the season of renewal. Months earlier, the earth slowly closed down for a long, cold slumber, with the promise of new life as the seasons turned. As the blanket of winter snow melts the air warms up, and storms start to form. Delivering the rain needed for the new growth bursting forth across the land.

Spring—and its promise of new beginnings—seemed obscene to me in the years following Becca’s death. The only season that felt comfortable to me was winter. Even though it held hard days and anniversaries, I made sense in the frigid days and lengthy nights. My soul was in its own winter, and I accepted this truth.

The first spring after losing my daughter was brutal.

Not only did it betray my idea of the world, it also held court proceedings for the drunk driver who killed my child. So much of it is a blur, memories spinning into each other, but I do remember seething when the sun shone brightly and splashed warmness all around me.

No. Not acceptable.

My world was still in the deepest part of winter.

I was rage-filled because my daughter did not have the hope of a future.
Hers was stolen from her that January night on the dark highway.
Her life was finished. Completed in a way that was not her choice.
Any dreams she had for her life were wiped out in a split second.

Yes, I lost her—but she lost herself.

I had years of this anger. Spring promised what we couldn’t have.

This is our first spring in the new house, so the budding and flowering plants are new to me. There was a rhythm in the old house I was accustomed to watching unfold — including which plants came to life first. Next to the driveway there were five flowering bushes that would show the first buds, then blooms, of the season. I had found them in the dumpster outside a local nursery, small and half-dead, so I dug them out and brought them home.
I had no idea they would take off and grow so big when I planted them.
I felt like I had saved their lives, so I was always happy when I saw them bloom

Various other plants and flowers would arrive shortly thereafter — Tiger Lilies, Lilacs. The Bridal Wreath Spirea was one of my favorites. Its long slender branches spilled over the brick half-wall onto the front porch. The flowers were delicate, but their existence was fleeting.

Much like my daughter’s time here on earth.

I’d sit near them, on a rocker, when I had a chance, because I knew they would soon be gone.

The new house has a whole different variety of plants — a new variety, but much fewer in number. I have a clean slate, of sorts, to plant what we choose.

I was sitting on the front steps and noticed a tree on the corner of the yard and the alleyway. It’s a good-sized tree. I’m not sure of the type. The main trunk is probably twenty-two to twenty-four inches in diameter, so I am unsure of the age. Multiple limbs have been removed over the years because they came too close to the roof, we were told. My roommate, the actual owner of the house, mentioned that she might take the whole tree down.

As I was sitting there looking at the tree, pondering its past, I wondered if it hurt when its limbs were removed.

Were the round scars, where life used to be, sensitive?

I felt a sadness because in a few weeks the entire tree might be gone.

Then I noticed something I had not seen before — dozens of thin branches growing from near the base of the tree. I had seen them in the winter when everything was bare, but now they had little bursts of tender green leaves along each one.

Had I thought they were dead and not just in hibernation?

The thought struck me that though the tree had been cut, vital parts of its whole taken away, it still believed in life.

The tree resonated with the innermost parts of who I am as a grieving mother.

Wounded, but still sprouting. Still trying to make something of the light.

To most, I think, those spindly, defiant branches would need to be trimmed off.
They are unsightly, I was told. Left would be dozens of tiny new injuries for the tree to scar over. The hopeful defiance in reaching toward life would end. How tragic.

Losing a child is much the same.

Child loss doesn’t break you. It un-makes you.

You’re no longer who you were before — it’s like every cell was burned down to ash, and only some are able to rebuild. Like the tree, you lose vital parts.But in child loss, it’s not a limb — it’s the roots. Somehow you’re still expected to stand.

And, miraculously, you do stand.

You exist. Waiting.

Waiting for your child to come back.
For all of it to make sense.
To breathe without suffocating from the grief.

I think winter understands this resting — the space between.
The life that held your child and this one that doesn’t. The holding steady.
That is where healing begins, I believe. Not in the exuberant insistence of spring. But in the small places of hibernation. Unseen places.

Our winter of the soul is a different length for each of us. Often, we can spend years in this season. I did. Over a decade, truthfully. Well over.

There is a strange safety in winter. You know what to expect — the bare branches, the muted sky, the sharp air that cuts when you breathe.

You don’t trust spring at first when it comes. You feel the sun one day, unexpected and gentle on your face, and you think — maybe.

Maybe the hold is loosening.

Maybe it’s time to stretch toward life again.

And then the dark clouds gather on the horizon. The temperature drops.
The wind returns with that certain smell — the one that tells you snow is coming, even before you see it. Pushing back against the warmth you dared to welcome.

It reminds you: winter isn’t finished with you yet.

Grief is like that, too.

Just when you think you’ve found your footing again, it howls through the empty places inside you, knocking you off balance. But maybe — just maybe — those moments of warmth aren’t lies. Maybe they are promises.
Not that winter is over — but that spring will, eventually, outlast it.

Then there comes a day when you realize: spring came earlier this year.
Not in the physical world, but in your own. Though it seems the two seasons cannot possibly co-exist… they somehow do. And you find yourself walking through them both at the same time. Winter and Spring. Sorrow and joy.

And maybe this is how healing begins. Life overlaps the pain. We don’t leave winter behind. Instead, we learn to turn toward the sun more often.
To take the places deep inside where our child’s death slaughtered us —
and let the new green shoots of healing take root, and have a chance to grow.

Just like the branches at the base of the tree — too wild for some, too unkempt — that is how healing can appear to the world.

Not pretty.
Not curated.
Not understandable to those who don’t know.

As I sit and admire the tree at our new house, I am struck at how alike we are.

I didn’t plan to survive after Becca died.
I didn’t know how anyone could survive this unimaginable loss.

But survival, it turns out, isn’t always a choice you make.
Sometimes it’s what happens while you are lying broken on the ground. When your soul is in hibernation.

I look at the tree’s tangled base — the low, rough branches, the scars twisting its trunk — and I realize: It didn’t grow that way to be admired. It grew that way to stay alive.

So did I.

Healing didn’t make me prettier.
It made me wilder.

And maybe that’s the truest thing about surviving the unbearable:
You don’t grow back into the person you were.
You grow into someone the world might not recognize —
someone rougher, braver, rooted deeper than before.

Someone who knows that new life doesn’t erase the scars.
It rises up through them.