Where She Still Lives.

My therapist often reminds me that there’s a benefit to everything—if you’re willing to look for it.

At first, I didn’t really understand what she meant. How could anything good come from the messy, painful parts of life? How could loss offer anything but heartbreak?

And then my mom died.

In that unbearable moment, I made a quiet, intentional decision: If there was something to learn from this, I would find it. I wasn’t expecting much. Honestly, I couldn’t imagine any possible benefit to losing the person who loved me most. But to my surprise, a few truths began to emerge—softly and slowly, but I had to be willing to see them.

Before she passed, I lived in constant fear of her death. That fear started when I was 19, after she had a heart attack, and never really let me go. I wasn’t her full-time caregiver until the last few years of her life, but I was always her emergency contact, her medical advocate, and her silent watchdog. I checked in often. I kept track of medications and doctor’s visits, and I knew her medical history better than she did.

The hospital became a second home—sterile and exhausting. I learned its rhythms, its codes, and its smells. I could navigate it like my own kitchen. All while trying to hold onto hope, even when it slipped through my fingers like sand.

She trusted me to hold everything together. And I did. But what neither of us ever really faced was how deeply her emotional pain had taken root in her body. She was tired—not just from the illnesses that had accumulated over the years, but from a lifetime of carrying invisible wounds.

When she died, everything changed.

The fear that had lived in me for so long? It disappeared. The vigilance, the anxiety, the tight grip on “what if”? Gone. Lifted so gently that I almost didn’t notice. In its place came grief—deep, suffocating, relentless. But alongside it came something else, something I hadn’t expected: peace.

For the first time in years, I could breathe.

And in that breath—new, strange, and unsteady—I began to see the world differently. Grief has a way of sharpening your vision. It changes your relationship with love, with time, and with yourself.

When you lose your mother, especially if she was the person who loved you most, you start to understand love in a new way. The love she gave you, the kind that was made just for you, disappears with her. Nothing replaces it, but in its absence, you begin to see the love that’s been around you all along.

The love from friends who show up.
The love in a therapist’s steady wisdom.
The love in blooming flowers, in a rising sun, in a familiar song on a hard day.

That love is real. And it waits for you. All you have to do is let it in.

And when you do—when you start to notice the quiet ways love persists—something else begins to grow alongside the grief.
Something gentle.
Something healing.

Gratitude.

Gratitude for the light my mother left behind—light inside me that refuses to dim.
Gratitude for the people still here: family, chosen family, and strangers turned soulmates through shared loss.
Gratitude for every tender moment of beauty—flowers that arrive right on time every year, the unwavering sun, and the ever present, watchful moon.

Even in loss, there is something to be gained.

And now, I believe her—my therapist. There is a benefit to everything. Sometimes, it’s just hidden in the folds of your heart, waiting for grief to reveal it.