What Grief Stole
When we’re pregnant, we dream of the type of life we’ll have with our new baby. New life being brought into our families, growing, filled with love, filled with hope for what’s to come. Never in those dreams do we envision things like birth trauma, our own parents dying, or frantically losing ourselves.
For anyone who has experienced the death loss of a parent while raising their own children, you know it doesn’t just physically take your parent. It takes a part of your future you had curated, it shape shifts a part of you, and it drastically changes the way you thought you’d be as a Mom.
In the darkest depths of grief, these losses feel cruel and wildly unfair. To go through loss highlights how precious time is, while simultaneously it steals your attention, your patience, and your connection with your own babies. You dreamed of presence, slow moments to treasure, energy to play, adventures, and memories with loved ones. The things you crave most from your deceased parent become the hardest things to give your children. Because at any age you realize, no matter how old you become - even when you become a parent yourself - you are and will always be, someone’s baby. There are so few people who can hold and care for you like a child. Now a grieving daughter, you have to hold your grief tightly and become all the things you need the most.
We can never go back. We can’t go back to the version of ourselves before loss. We can’t get time back. We can’t reclaim what has been stolen from us. We survive when we coast on autopilot. We begin to thrive again when we move with intentionality, when we lean into others loving us, when we cry & scream when our bodies are begging for release, and when we love fiercely no matter how much we’ve lost.
In the time immediately after your parent dies, you will do what you need to survive it. The grief will come in waves, the body will oscillate between intensely feeling, auto pilot, and numbness. As you move through your grief, you may notice things about yourself or your life that maybe went unnoticed before loss. In this messy, unhinged middle is where you decide how to reemerge. It will require more of you than you could ever imagine. But this is where you fight for your life. This is where you hold your kids and breathe them in and imagine all the memories they will keep of you. You will hold tightly to love and liberate yourself by shedding all the old ways of being that no longer serve you. It is here, in this space, that you open up to receive again after all that has been stolen. It is here you will come alive.
