Where Love Lives Now: On Grief, Time, and the Shape of What Remains

There are certain days that hold a quiet weight.

A birthday.

An anniversary.

A date your body remembers before your mind does.

Last week held one of those days for me.

It was the ninth anniversary of my mom leaving the physical earth.

I notice how grief and love continue their dance.

Sometimes it feels like a lifetime ago.

Sometimes it feels like just a breath.

Grief is one of the few guarantees we have in this life. There is no detour around it. No way to think or plan or love our way out of it. If we live long enough, we will lose someone we love.

And when it arrives, it can split us wide open.

But here’s the gentle invitation I keep returning to - both in my own life and in my work:

What if we didn’t rush to close that opening?

What if we allowed ourselves to be with it?

To be with the ache and the tenderness.

The quiet joy and the devastation.

The moments that undo us… and the ones that carry us through.

To let grief exist alongside real life -

Answering emails.

Making dinner.

Sitting in carpool lines.

Laughing with a friend.

Crying in the car.

Not separate from life - but woven into it.

Because that’s what it actually looks like.

We often move toward healing as if it’s a destination - something that will eventually make the pain go away. But in my experience, and in the sacred work I do with families, healing doesn’t come from fixing what feels broken.

It comes from making room.

Room for grief.

Room for relief.

Room for beauty, and memory, and even joy.

There is a kind of healing that happens when we allow all of it to coexist. This is the heart of the work.

To let it all in.

To be with what is real.

Gently. Courageously. Fully.

Over time, I’ve come to understand something else, too:

Love doesn’t disappear when someone dies.

It changes form.

I feel my mom in quiet moments.

In unexpected signs.

In the way beauty and kindness show up, unannounced, in ordinary days.

Sometimes the missing feels close.

Other times, the love feels even closer.

And both are true.

This is the paradox of grief - the both/and.

You can ache for someone and feel deeply grateful. You can miss them and still feel connected. You can carry sorrow and joy in the same breath.

Not because something has been resolved…

But because your heart holds it all.

If you are grieving someone you love, I want you to hear this:

There is nothing you need to fix.

There is no timeline you need to follow.

No version of “moving on” you need to achieve.

There is only this:

Your love.

Your loss.

Your way of carrying both.

Grief, like love, is not linear. It moves in waves, rhythms, seasons. It softens. It surprises. It returns.

And over time, if we allow it, it reshapes us - not into someone broken, but into someone more spacious.

More able to hold what is tender.

More attuned to what is meaningful.

More anchored in love.

Today, I’m remembering my mom.

But more than that - I’m noticing where love lives now. And maybe that’s the quiet shift grief invites us into. Not just looking back at what was - but learning how to recognize what still is.