Growing Through Change: When Someone We Love Dies

Grief asks us to learn how to carry what we cannot change while still choosing how we want to live.

There are some life transitions we anticipate. Getting married. Having children. Watching those children grow up and leave home. Retirement. We may not know exactly what those transitions will feel like, but we know they are coming.

Then there are the transitions we don’t (even though we intellectually understand that it is inevitable). The death of a parent. A sibling. A friend. A partner. Someone who has been woven into the story of our lives.

My mom died suddenly in 2016. One days she was here. The next she wasn’t. I remember the strange reality of losing one of the few people on this life journey who loved me unconditionally. There is something profoundly disorienting about realizing that the person who has been part of your story for your entire life is suddenly no longer here to call, to ask a question, to share a memory, or simply to exist in the world alongside you.

And suddenly, life is divided into a before and an after.

Grief is so much more than sadness.

There can be disbelief. This can't really be happening.

There can be bargaining. What if...? If only...? Maybe somehow...

There can be anger—at the circumstances, at other people, at God, at the unfairness of it all.

There can be deep sadness and loneliness. There can be moments when the absence feels almost physical.

And there can even be relief. That one can be particularly difficult to admit. Relief doesn't mean we didn't love someone. Sometimes it means the suffering has ended. Sometimes it means the caregiving has ended. Sometimes it means we can finally exhale after months or years of holding our breath in anticipatory grief.

Grief doesn't always look the way we think it should. We may laugh at a funeral. We may feel okay one afternoon and fall apart in the grocery store the next morning. We may go months thinking we're doing better, only to hear a song, smell a familiar perfume, or see someone who looks vaguely like them and suddenly find ourselves awashed in the middle of it.

And maybe that's part of what we need to normalize about grief: There is no “right” way to miss someone.

Grief isn't a series of neatly organized stages that we check off until we arrive at acceptance. We circle back. We move forward and backward. We carry several feelings at once. We can be heartbroken and grateful. Angry and loving. Lonely and relieved. Missing someone terribly and still finding a reason to laugh. And eventually, hopefully, there are moments of acceptance. Not acceptance that they are gone in some tidy, finished way. But an acceptance that this is now part of our story. We begin to learn how to live with the empty chair. We tell the stories. We hear their voice in our own. We recognize their mannerisms in our children. We laugh at something they used to say—and then, sometimes, laugh through the tears because for a moment, remembering them feels more like a gift than a wound.

That doesn't mean we have “moved on” from our grief. Maybe we have learned to move forward while carrying them with us. Because death changes a life. It changes families. It changes traditions. It changes our sense of time. It can change our relationships with siblings and surviving parents.

And sometimes, especially as we move through midlife, losing someone we love changes the way we see our own mortality. If we are fortunate, grief can eventually become an invitation to make meaning of their life, our life, and the preciousness of the time we have left. We begin to understand that we are no longer only someone's child. We are becoming the older generation—the keepers of stories, traditions, memories, and the people who came before us. There can be both beauty and grief in realizing that we, too, are moving closer to the end of our own story.

So if you are grieving, whether the loss happened yesterday or ten years ago, be gentle with yourself. You don't have to make your grief look a certain way. You don't have to be “over it.” You don't have to find a lesson in it. You don't have to stop missing them in order to begin living again.

Again, grief asks us to learn how to carry what we cannot change while still choosing how we want to live.

And maybe, with time, we learn that carrying someone with us doesn't always have to feel heavy. Sometimes it sounds like their laugh. Sometimes it looks like a family recipe. Sometimes it's a story you've told a hundred times. Sometimes it's a tattoo on your arm that calls you back to them. And sometimes it's the unexpected sound of your own laughter through tears when you realize:

They are still part of me.

And perhaps that is one of the ways we grow through change.