He means it as a compliment.

Other people say versions of it too. They tell me how well I’m doing. How happy and well looked after Khairo is.

And honestly, he is.

Khairo is amazing. He is genuinely this little ball of joy. He smiles at everyone, laughs constantly and is just such a happy baby.

But man.

Even with an “easy” baby, this shit is hard.

And lately I’ve realised that being called Supermum sometimes makes me want to scream.

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Because there’s something about that word that feels like it permits everyone to relax.

Supermum’s got it.

Supermum will figure it out.

Supermum knows what the baby needs.

Supermum will ask if she needs help.

Supermum to the rescue.

Except sometimes I don’t want to have to ask.

Sometimes I want somebody to notice I’m tired.

Last night was one of those nights.

Nothing dramatic had happened.

Khairo hadn’t been unusually difficult. There hadn’t been an argument. Nobody had done anything wrong.

I’d just reached the end of myself.

I didn’t want a night away from my baby.

I didn’t even necessarily want to be alone.

I just wanted to stop being switched on.

I didn’t want to talk.

I didn’t want to make another decision.

I didn’t want to think about what anybody needed next.

I needed to regulate myself. To press some kind of emotional reset button before I could be present again.

So when my partner came home after being out all day dealing with servicing and MOT stuff, I let him take over with Khairo.

I had a shower.

I got myself something to eat.

And I went quiet.

Really quiet.

In fairness to him, I didn’t explain myself.

I didn’t say, I’m overwhelmed, and I need twenty minutes where nobody speaks to me.

I just shut down.

So he thought I was angry with him.

Maybe I resented him for being out all day.

Maybe he’d done something wrong.

He hadn’t.

It wasn’t really about him.

It was bigger than that.

I missed my mum.

God, I missed my mum.

And how do you explain that?

How do you explain that it’s a random Thursday, four years later, and suddenly you are so deeply sad that your mum is dead?

There was no anniversary.

No photo had popped up.

Nothing had happened.

I was just tired.

And I wanted my mum.

The one person who would have looked at me and said,

Helen, you’re doing too much.

The one person who probably would have noticed I needed a break before I did.

Before I got quiet.

Before I shut down.

Before I had to ask.

And somewhere in all of that, I realised why being called Supermum had been bothering me so much.

My mum wouldn’t have called me Supermum.

She would have known I was tired.

I think when you’re someone who usually just gets on with things, people get used to you getting on with things.

And after a while, they stop thinking to ask whether you’re actually okay doing it.

People see you getting everything done and assume that means you’re okay.

Sometimes it just means everything still needed doing.

I think that’s why “you’re so strong” can feel complicated after grief too.

I know what people mean when they say it.

They’re trying to acknowledge everything you’ve survived.

But sometimes being called strong starts to feel like you’re expected to stay that way.

You managed yesterday.

So you’ll manage today.

You’ve been through worse.

You’ll figure it out.

And maybe you know exactly what I mean.

Maybe people have got so used to you being the one who handles things that nobody really notices the effort it takes anymore.

You become the strong one without ever remembering agreeing to it.

And after you’ve done it for long enough, people start thinking that’s just who you are.

Independent.

Strong.

Doesn’t need much.

When actually, maybe you just got used to not having much choice.

Motherhood seems particularly good at doing this.

We love telling mums how amazing they are for managing everything.

Look how happy the baby is.

Look how well she’s doing.

Look how she keeps everything going.

Supermum.

Sometimes I think we’d be more useful if we just took something off her plate.

Because a happy, loved, well-looked-after baby tells you that a baby is cared for.

It doesn’t necessarily tell you how his mum is doing.

And I think that’s why I wanted my mum so badly that Thursday.

She knew me before I became anybody’s mum.

Before motherhood.

Before all of this grief.

Before I had accumulated all these reasons for people to tell me how strong I am.

To her, I was just Helen.

Her daughter.

And mums have this irritating way of noticing things you’re trying very hard not to announce.

She would have known.

You’re doing too much.

Give me the baby.

Go and eat.

Go and sit down.

I wouldn’t have needed to earn the break by falling apart first.

I wouldn’t have needed to prove I couldn’t cope.

She wouldn’t have needed Supermum.

She would have seen me.

And then there’s the other part of it.

She doesn’t know Khairo.

He doesn’t know her.

And God, she would have been obsessed with him.

Absolutely obsessed.

The kind of obsessed where I probably would have had to remind her that he was actually my child.

I know exactly how she would have loved him because I know how she loved us.

And it makes me sad.

I’m sad that I have to mother without her.

I’m sad that Khairo doesn’t get to experience her insane love.

I’m sad that she never got to know this funny, happy little person who would have brought her so much joy.

Sometimes I’m sad for him.

Sometimes I’m sad for her.

And sometimes, selfishly, I’m sad for me.

Because I was supposed to become somebody’s daughter while learning how to be somebody’s mother.

I think that’s one of the things I wasn’t prepared for when I lost her.

You don’t only miss being mothered when something goes wrong.

Sometimes you miss it when you’re actually doing okay.

When the baby is happy.

When everyone is fed.

When you’ve made it through another day.

When people are telling you what an amazing job you’re doing.

And you just wish your mum was there to see it.

Or, on days like Thursday, to see you through it.

Maybe this isn’t really about the word Supermum.

I think it’s about what happens when people get used to you coping.

Eventually, you get used to it too.

And sometimes you don’t realise you need help until you’re already shutting down.

Because my partner isn’t a mind reader.

I didn’t tell him what was happening that night.

I went quiet and expected him to somehow understand something I hadn’t even worked out myself yet.

Sometimes grief is like that.

Sometimes I don’t realise I’m grieving until I’m already deep in it.

Sometimes I miss my mum comes out looking a lot more like please don’t speak to me.

And I’m still learning how to say it before I get there.

I’m overwhelmed.

I need you to take over for a bit.

I need to be quiet.

I miss my mum today.

I know my partner means it lovingly when he calls me Supermum.

And I am proud of the mum I am.

I love being Khairo’s mum.

But some days I don’t want to be Supermum.

I don’t want my ability to cope to become evidence that I don’t need care.

I don’t want to have to fall apart before I’m allowed to be tired.

Sometimes I don’t need somebody to tell me how strong I am.

I need somebody to take the baby.

Let me shower.

Let me eat.

Let me be quiet.

And ask how I’m doing too.

Sometimes Supermum just wants to be somebody’s daughter again.

I told her I’d do better.

I’d be stronger.

I’d become the daughter she’d raised me to be.

I’d live up to the dreams she’d had for me.

I’d make her proud.

And I meant it.

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I really believed I was going to get back on that plane to London and hit the ground running.

I’d lost my mum. I’d watched her die. I’d spent years before caring for her.

Surely after everything we’d been through, I couldn’t just go back to living the same life.

My mum used to say, “You can’t have a testimony without a test.”

So maybe somewhere in my head, I thought this was mine.

This was the test.

And now I had to do something with it.

I had to become something because of it.

Except that’s not really what happened.

I came back to London and worked.

A lot.

Sixteen-hour days.

At one point, two 9–5s.

I kept myself busy constantly.

At the time, I would have told you I was ambitious. I was working hard. I was trying to build a better life.

And some of that was true.

But I can see now that some of it was distraction too.

Because if you’re working sixteen hours a day, there isn’t much time left to think.

There isn’t much time to sit in your house and realise your mum isn’t going to call.

Or to think about everything that happened.

Or to work out who you’re supposed to be now that she’s gone.

So I worked.

And life carried on.

Then, less than three years later, I found myself making promises again.

This time I wasn’t sitting beside my mum’s grave.

I was lying on a hospital bed holding my daughter.

Mirae had died at thirty-five weeks and six days.

I remember holding her and promising her I’d be the mum she deserved.

That I’d do better.

That I’d become someone she could look up to.

Someone she’d be proud to call her mum.

I’d spent months imagining the mother I was going to be when she came home.

Now she wasn’t coming home and somehow I was still promising her I would become that woman.

I don’t really know why I made those promises.

Maybe I needed to believe I could still do something for her when there was nothing left I could actually do.

But I meant them.

Every single one.

After Mirae, I didn’t throw myself into work in quite the same way.

I had something else to focus on.

Getting pregnant again.

I wanted to get stronger.

I wanted to get healthier.

I wanted my body to recover.

I researched everything.

What I should eat.

What supplements I should take.

What exercise I should do.

What I could possibly change before another pregnancy.

Not because I wanted to replace Mirae.

You can’t replace your child.

I just desperately wanted the chance to bring a baby home.

So I had something to work towards.

Getting stronger. Getting healthier. Preparing my body. Trying again.

And I think I needed that.

I needed there to be something after.

Eventually, I became pregnant again.

Then Khairo came early.

And there was another thing to survive.

Another thing that needed all of me.

Now things are quieter.

Not quiet. I have a baby.

But quiet enough that I’ve started looking at myself again.

And I’ve realised something I don’t particularly like admitting.

It’s been four years since my mum died.

Fifteen months since Mirae died.

And I haven’t become the woman I promised either of them I would be.

Not yet.

I’ve started businesses I genuinely believed in and then stopped.

I’ve enrolled on courses I wanted to do and procrastinated over studying.

I’ve told myself I’ll go to the gym because my whole body aches and I know I need to take better care of it, and then I can’t seem to commit for more than a couple of days.

I have ideas all the time.

I know there are things I want to do with my life.

I know I’m capable of more.

But there’s been this gap between the person I keep saying I’m going to become and the person I’ve actually managed to be.

My partner and I have talked about it.

Is it self-sabotage?

Am I getting in my own way?

Have I become lazy?

Do I just need more discipline?

Because when you keep starting things and stopping, eventually you start wondering if the problem is you.

I think that feeling got worse because I kept seeing what other people seemed to do with their grief.

Someone loses someone and starts a charity.

Someone writes a book.

Builds a business.

Changes careers.

Finds their purpose.

Their grief becomes the thing that pushes them towards the life they were apparently always meant to live.

And I’d look at those stories and think...

Why hasn’t that happened to me?

Where is my testimony?

Where is this stronger version of me I promised my mum?

Where is the mother I promised Mirae she’d be able to look up to?

I thought grief would make me want more from life because I knew how quickly life could disappear.

Sometimes it did.

But a lot of the time it just made me tired.

And I was ashamed of that.

Lately, though, I’ve started wondering why I thought grief needed to make me anything so quickly.

Why did losing my mum have to make me more successful?

Why did losing Mirae have to make me stronger?

Why did something good have to come from something so awful?

Why wasn’t surviving it enough for a while?

Maybe some of it was self-sabotage.

I’m sure there were times I got in my own way.

But I don’t think that explains all of it anymore.

I could see everything I wasn’t doing.

I couldn’t see everything I was carrying.

When my mum died, I didn’t only have to learn how to live without her.

I had to learn who I was without her.

Then Mirae died, and it happened again.

Another version of my life disappeared.

Another version of me went with it.

Then I had to figure out how to be Khairo’s mum while still being Mirae’s.

How to love this little boy completely while still missing my daughter completely.

How to let myself be happy when I know exactly how quickly happiness can disappear.

How to trust life again when, if I’m honest, I’m not sure I do.

Maybe I was expecting far too much from myself while all of that was happening.

I wonder if we do this to grief more generally.

We seem to like grief when we can see where it went.

The charity.

The book.

The foundation.

The new career.

The marathon.

The person who says losing someone taught them to finally start living.

And those stories are beautiful.

I understand why we tell them.

But I wonder what they quietly teach the person whose grief hasn’t produced anything yet.

The person who loses someone and, three years later, is still just trying to get through ordinary days.

The person who hasn’t found their purpose.

The person who keeps starting and stopping.

The person who still doesn’t know what they’re supposed to do with everything that’s happened to them.

What if grief doesn’t make you extraordinary?

What if, for a while, it just makes you tired?

What if you don’t need to make something beautiful out of the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?

Maybe purpose gives us somewhere to put the pain.

Maybe that’s part of why I kept making promises.

If I became this strong, successful woman after my mum died, maybe I’d have something to show for everything we’d been through.

If I became this incredible mother after Mirae died, maybe I could somehow make her proud.

Even writing that makes me uncomfortable.

Because my mum’s life doesn’t need me to become successful for it to have mattered.

Mirae’s life doesn’t need me to build something extraordinary for hers to have mattered either.

My mum mattered because she was my mum.

Mirae mattered because she was my daughter.

They don’t need me to turn losing them into a success story.

And yet somehow I had made myself responsible for doing exactly that.

Maybe you’ve made promises too.

Maybe at a hospital bedside.

At a funeral.

Beside a grave.

Or maybe you never said them out loud.

I’ll make you proud.

I’ll look after everyone.

I’ll stop wasting time.

I’ll finally do the thing I kept putting off.

I’ll make something of my life.

And maybe it’s been one year.

Or four.

Or ten.

And you haven’t done all of it.

Maybe you’ve quietly wondered what that says about you.

Maybe you’ve watched other people turn grief into purpose and wondered why you’re still trying to get through the day.

I don’t know what it says about you.

I’m still working out what it says about me.

But I’m beginning to think surviving something doesn’t immediately make us responsible for turning it into something meaningful.

Sometimes surviving it might be enough.

I think about the woman sitting beside my mum’s grave sometimes.

I feel sorry for her now.

Not in a pitying way.

I just wish I could sit beside her and tell her to stop making so many promises.

She’d just lost her mum.

She didn’t need a five-year plan.

She needed to grieve.

She didn’t need to promise to become stronger.

She was already trying to survive something that had completely changed her.

And then I think about myself on that hospital bed with Mirae.

Doing exactly the same thing.

My daughter had just died and somehow I was already making promises about the woman I would become afterwards.

I don’t know why I kept asking grieving versions of myself to be responsible for building the next one.

Maybe when we can’t change what has happened, we start making promises about what we’ll change next.

Maybe it gives us something that still feels within our control.

I don’t know.

Four years later, I still haven’t kept every promise I made to my mum.

Fifteen months later, I haven’t become everything I promised Mirae I’d be either.

That’s difficult for me to admit.

And I don’t want to wrap that truth in a beautiful sentence and pretend I’ve suddenly made peace with it.

I haven’t.

I still want to make my mum proud.

I still want to become the kind of woman my daughter would look up to.

I still want to become her.

That’s the part I don’t want to lose.

But I’m starting to question why I thought I needed to become her immediately.

Why grief had to produce purpose before I’d even had time to grieve.

Why surviving wasn’t allowed to be enough for a while.

Maybe purpose comes later.

Maybe it doesn’t.

Maybe you find it, lose it and find something completely different.

I don’t know yet.

What I do know is that I don’t want to keep punishing myself for not being further ahead.

Maybe that’s where grace comes in.

Not giving up on the promises.

Not giving up on the woman I still want to become.

Just allowing the woman I am now to be unfinished.

And giving her some time to grow into them.

That you need birthdays, family holidays, first words, school photographs and years together before your loss becomes “big enough” to carry.

But sometimes grief isn’t made from memories.

Sometimes it’s made from a life you were already living together.

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I knew my daughter long before I ever met her.

I knew her because I carried her.

I knew her because every morning I woke up wondering how big she’d grown overnight.

I knew her because she answered me with kicks whenever I lay down at the end of the day, specifically at 11 pm, every night.

I knew where her cot would go.

I remember standing in the baby aisle for far longer than anyone needed to, trying to decide which blanket I wanted to wrap her in. As though I had all the time in the world to choose, ultimately choosing the one her grandma, my fiance’s mum, made.

I knew how I imagined introducing her to our family.

I remember laughing and secretly hoping she’d have my hair.

It’s strange, the conversations your mind still remembers when the ending changes.

Every appointment.

Every heartbeat we listened for before the sonographer found it.

Every kick that made me stop what I was doing and smile, especially whenever her dad played Michael Jackson's Beat It, Toni Braxton's Un-Break My Heart, or any Soca song. I'd laugh because she always seemed to dance along.

Every tiny outfit folded into a drawer.

Every nosebleed I got when I was stressed. I convinced myself it was Mirae's way of telling me to slow down. I'd laugh and call her my little zen girl, as though she already knew how to calm me better than anyone else.

Every plan that quietly grew another heartbeat into it.

Piece by piece, she was becoming part of every ordinary day.

When Mirae died, she had been alive for thirty-five weeks and 6 days;

I know it as instinctively as I know my own birthday.

Thirty-five weeks.

Thirty-five weeks sounds short until you realise it was long enough for me to become her mother.

I still find myself saying that number.

As though if I say it often enough, people will understand she wasn’t almost here.

She was here.

She was my daughter. You don't need a lifetime to become someone's child.

Sometimes people hear thirty-five weeks and immediately think about everything that didn’t happen.

She never took her first breath.

She never came home.

She never learned to walk.

She never said, “Mum.”

As though everything she didn’t get to do somehow matters more than everything she already meant.

But when I think of Mirae...

those aren’t the moments I think about first.

I think about carrying her.

I think about talking to her when nobody else was listening.

I think about placing my hands on my stomach without even realising I’d done it.

I think about how natural it already felt to say, my baby.

Motherhood didn't begin in the delivery room.
It began the day I began loving her.

Long before anyone else knows them...

You’re already becoming their mother.

By thirty-five weeks, Mirae wasn’t simply a baby I was waiting for.

She had already become part of who I was.

She had changed how I imagined every birthday.

Every Christmas.

Every ordinary Tuesday.

I had already started measuring my life as before she arrives and after she arrives.

I never imagined there would be another version.

When she died, I wasn’t grieving thirty-five weeks.

I was grieving my daughter.

I was grieving the relationship we had already begun.

The first bath.

The sleepless nights I used to worry about.

The first time she’d wrap her tiny fingers around mine.

Watching her personality slowly unfold.

Hearing her laugh.

Watching her become whoever she was always going to be.

Sometimes people ask if it’s harder because there are so few memories.

But that’s the thing.

There aren’t so few.

They’re just different.

They’re quieter.

They’re the memories that existed before anyone else got to meet her.

Some of the deepest grief comes from never getting the chance to remember at all.

From loving someone so completely that they reshape your identity…

before the world ever learns their face.

People often think I lost a future.

I did.

But I also lost a present.

I lost the little girl I already knew.

The hardest part wasn’t saying goodbye.
It was having nowhere left to put all the love that had already arrived.

Mirae’s life was brief.

My love for her wasn’t.

It still isn’t.

And neither is the space she continues to hold in my life.

Because grief isn’t measured by how long someone stayed.

It’s measured by how deeply they mattered.

For a long time, I thought that was the goal too.

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If I worked hard enough...

If enough time passed...

If I went to therapy...

Perhaps one day I’d finally feel like myself again.

I don’t think that’s what healing is anymore.

Because grief doesn’t simply interrupt your life.

It quietly changes the person living it.

After my mum died, I kept waiting for the version of me that existed before caregiving to come back.

The daughter who wasn’t constantly anticipating bad news.

The woman who could make plans without wondering what might go wrong.

The person who hadn’t yet learnt how fragile life could be.

She never came back.

After losing Mirae, I waited again.

Surely motherhood would eventually feel the way I’d always imagined.

Then my son was born.

People often imagine a new baby restores what was lost.

It doesn’t.

It gives you new love.

But it also gives grief new places to live.

I found myself checking on him more than I thought I would.

Loving him with overwhelming gratitude.

Loving him with a fear I’d never known before.

Not because I expected something terrible to happen.

Because grief had permanently changed the way I experienced love.

I’ve realised something.

Healing isn’t finding your way back to the person you were before the loss.

It’s learning who you are after it.

I think that’s why so many grieving people feel frustrated with themselves.

We’re trying to solve the wrong problem.

We’re searching for someone who no longer exists.

Not because grief destroyed them.

Because grief transformed them.

Every significant loss leaves an imprint.

On how we love.

On how we trust.

On what we notice.

On what we fear.

On what we value.

On the future we imagine.

Even joy feels different.

Not smaller.

Just experienced by someone who now knows what it costs to lose.

For a long time, I thought something was wrong with me because I couldn’t get back to “normal.”

Looking back, I don’t think normal was waiting for me.

It only existed before the loss.

Healing isn’t measured by returning to who we were.

It begins when we stop searching for our old selves and start making peace with who we are now.

First, when we realise they may never become who we needed them to be.

Then again, when they die.

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I recently read an essay by called When Grief Isn’t Just Love With Nowhere to Go.

It stayed with me.

Not because it answered a question.

Because it gave language to conversations I’d already been having.

A close family friend recently lost her ex-husband.

They shared four children.

Their relationship had been difficult, and for nearly two decades he had been largely absent from his children’s lives.

After he was diagnosed with cancer, his eldest daughter made a genuine effort to rebuild their relationship.

When we spoke after he died, what surprised me wasn’t that she seemed at peace with his death.

It was what she couldn’t stop talking about.

Not losing him.

The resentment.

The years he’d missed.

The father he never became.

Listening to her, I realised something.

Sometimes grief isn’t about the relationship you lost.

It’s about the relationship you never got to have.

That conversation stayed with me because my dad is still alive.

Yet, in many ways, I’ve already spent years grieving him.

He left when I was ten years old.

Some parents leave long before they die.

I’m thirty-one now.

There are parts of our relationship that I no longer believe can be repaired.

Sometimes the hardest part isn’t their absence.

It’s spending years hoping they’ll come back differently.

I still hope he lives a long life.

There’s nothing to say I’ll even outlive him.

This may never become my story.

But recently my sister and I found ourselves having a conversation I never expected we’d have.

What happens if Dad dies?

Not emotionally.

Practically.

Who organises the funeral?

Who pays for it?

Who hosts the wake?

My sister immediately spoke about obligation.

“We’d have to do it.”

She wasn’t talking about love.

She was talking about duty.

Love isn’t the only thing that survives someone.

Sometimes obligation does too.

And I realised I felt something very different.

Not because I wished him harm.

Not because I wouldn’t feel anything.

But because I couldn’t separate his death from the life we’d actually lived.

Then something else happened.

Before I’d even answered the question, I could already hear the voices.

“Your mum would’ve done it.”

“That’s still your father.”

“What will people think?”

In that moment, I realised I wasn’t only imagining my dad’s death.

I was imagining everyone else’s expectations of me afterwards.

Because grief doesn’t only ask us what we’ve lost.

Sometimes it asks who we’re expected to become.

In my culture, funerals aren’t simply private expressions of grief.

They’re acts of honour.

Of respect.

Of family.

They don’t only say goodbye to the person who died.

They tell the community who the living are expected to be.

Sometimes we’re not only mourning the dead.

We’re performing the role our culture has already written for us.

And suddenly I found myself asking a question I’d never considered before.

What happens when culture asks you to publicly mourn someone you’ve been privately grieving for years?

Because that’s the thing about complicated relationships.

Death doesn’t erase complicated relationships.

It doesn’t rewrite twenty-one years of absence.

It simply makes permanent the relationship that already existed.

People often describe grief as love with nowhere to go.

I think complicated grief can be something else entirely.

Sometimes it’s hope with nowhere left to live.

Not hope they’ll stay alive.

Hope that one day there’d be an apology.

Hope that one day the phone call would be different.

Hope that one day your children would know the grandparent you always imagined they might become.

Perhaps that’s why conversations about complicated grief are so difficult.

Because we’re expected to mourn the person who died.

We rarely talk about mourning the relationship that never truly existed.

And when culture is added to the picture, grief becomes even more complicated.

Because now you’re not only navigating your own emotions.

You’re navigating obligation.

Expectation.

Reputation.

Family.

The invisible rules you’ve inherited about what a good daughter should do.

I don’t know what I’ll do if my dad dies.

Maybe I’ll surprise myself.

Maybe grief will surprise me.

Life rarely unfolds exactly as we imagine.

But I do know this.

If that day comes,

I won’t only be grieving one man.

I’ll be grieving every version of our relationship that never came to be.

And I’ll be trying to find a way to honour my own truth inside a culture that has its own understanding of what honour looks like.

Sometimes honouring the dead and honouring yourself don’t feel like the same thing.

Some people lose a parent.

Others lose the possibility of ever having one.

They're not always the same loss.

It’s about asking them in the right context.

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I’m a huge advocate for therapy.

I’ve been in therapy at different points since 2021, and I’m now training to become a therapist myself.

So this isn’t an argument against therapy.

It’s a reflection on something therapy taught me about healing.

Therapy gave me something I desperately needed.

A place to empty the weight I’d been carrying.

Language for thoughts that had lived inside me for years without words.

Perspective.

But looking back, I don’t think therapy healed me.

It prepared me for the work healing would ask of me.

Most of that work happened outside the therapy room.

There was something else I hadn’t expected.

Sometimes I’d finally reach the hardest part of a story.

I’d be talking about my mum.

About caregiving.

About the loneliness.

Sometimes I’d be crying.

Then my therapist would stop me.

“Can you tell me more about that tradition?”

“Why couldn’t you tell your family how you felt?”

“What would’ve happened if you had?”

They were good questions.

Necessary questions.

I never expected my therapist to understand every culture he worked with.

How could he?

But every time I stopped to answer, I felt myself leaving my grief...

...to explain the world my grief belonged to.

Before we could explore my pain...

I found myself translating my life.

Not my grief.

My world.

Not because my therapist had done anything wrong.

Because he couldn’t understand what I didn’t explain.

But there’s something difficult about pausing the hardest moment of your story to explain the world it happened inside.

It’s hard to stay connected to your grief when you suddenly become its interpreter.

I explained Ethiopian mourning traditions.

Why grief belongs to the wider community, not only the immediate family.

Why, after caring for my mum for four years, I couldn’t simply tell my family how alone I’d felt.

Not because those feelings weren’t real.

But because those conversations carried consequences.

My aunt wasn’t only someone who had hurt me.

She was also my mum’s sister.

My uncle hadn’t only left me to carry the caregiving.

He had lost his sister too.

Their grief existed alongside mine.

Looking back, I realised something.

The biggest challenge wasn’t that my therapist didn’t understand Ethiopian culture.

I never expected him to.

The biggest challenge came when culturally neutral advice was treated as universally applicable.

Those aren’t the same thing.

In many therapy spaces, healing can sound surprisingly straightforward.

Express your feelings.

Have the difficult conversation.

Set boundaries.

Speak your truth.

Sometimes those are exactly the right things to do.

But only if they make sense inside the life you’re returning to afterwards.

Because healing doesn’t happen in theory.

It happens inside real lives.

Inside families.

Inside cultures.

For me, telling my family how hurt I’d been wasn’t simply an act of honesty.

It could have fractured relationships I wasn’t prepared to lose while I was already grieving one of the biggest losses of my life.

The advice wasn’t wrong.

It just belonged to a different world than the one I was trying to heal inside.

Therapy gave me insight.

But insight wasn’t the same as integration.

Understanding why I felt the way I did didn’t automatically tell me how to live differently.

That happened afterwards.

While writing.

While reading.

During long conversations with my partner.

While studying grief.

While training to become a therapist myself.

Healing happened in the ordinary moments between sessions.

The therapy room lasted fifty minutes.

The rest of my life didn’t.

That’s where I had to practise everything therapy had helped me understand.

I’m more convinced than ever that therapy matters.

But I’m equally convinced that healing cannot be separated from the world people return to afterwards.

Culture comes home with you.

Family comes home with you.

Faith comes home with you.

Identity comes home with you.

Grief comes home with you.

As I move closer to becoming a therapist, I don’t think the question is,

“How do I become an expert in every culture?”

That’s impossible.

I think the better question is,

“Am I assuming the path to healing that makes sense in my world will also make sense in theirs?”

Because people don’t just bring their emotions into the therapy room.

They bring the world those emotions were shaped in.

As I move closer to becoming a therapist, I don’t think my role is simply to understand someone’s grief.

It’s to become curious about the world their grief belongs to.

Because healing doesn’t happen inside the therapy room.

It happens inside the life people return to when they leave it.

Nobody tells us it can become just as loud when life finally starts coming back together.

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Some of the happiest moments of my life have also been some of the most painful.

The birth of my son.

Getting engaged.

Passing both years of my counselling course.

Publishing writing that finally felt like my own.

Each milestone carried two emotions at once.

Joy.

And absence.

Every achievement came with the same quiet thought.

I wish Mum could see this.

I wish my daughter could be here for this.

Not because the joy wasn’t real.

Because both of them had always belonged in the future I imagined.

Then I noticed something else.

Grief wasn’t only making good moments feel bittersweet.

It was making me afraid to create them in the first place.

There were opportunities I didn’t apply for.

Invitations I quietly declined.

Dreams I convinced myself could wait.

Looking back, I wasn’t only grieving what I’d lost.

I was afraid to love a future that could disappear too.

When you’ve learned that life can change overnight...

Hope starts to feel risky.

You begin negotiating with yourself.

Maybe next year.

Maybe when I feel more like myself.

Maybe after I’ve healed.

Except grief rarely announces that you’ve healed enough.

It simply becomes quieter while you’re busy surviving.

Looking back, I don’t think I was protecting myself from failure.

I was protecting myself from loving a future that might disappear too.

I don’t think we talk enough about how grief changes our relationship with possibility.

People often think grief is only about looking backwards.

Missing who you’ve lost.

Remembering what you’ve had.

But grief quietly changes the way you look forwards too.

It teaches you that the future isn’t guaranteed.

Sometimes that makes us hold it more gently.

Sometimes it makes us stop reaching for it altogether.

I see this in myself now.

Even in the happiest chapters of my life.

My son laughs.

I instinctively think of what my daughter’s laugh would have sounded like.

Before every exam...

Before I press publish on another essay...

I still think,

Mum would’ve known exactly what time this started.

She would’ve been praying for me.

Life grows bigger.

So does the space where they should have been.

That’s the paradox nobody prepared me for.

The better life becomes...

The more places there are to miss someone.

But I’ve also realised something else.

If grief can make us hesitate to live...

Then perhaps living is one of the ways we continue loving.

Not because success replaces the people we’ve lost.

It doesn’t.

Not because joy erases grief.

It never will.

But because the future they hoped we’d have still deserves to be lived.

Even if they aren’t here to see it.

Maybe healing isn’t reaching a place where grief no longer visits your happiest moments.

Maybe it’s choosing to keep building a life beautiful enough that you still wish they were here to see it.

Life rarely unfolds so neatly.

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Sometimes another loss arrives before we’ve even put the first one down.

Then another.

And another.

People often describe resilient people as strong.

I’ve started wondering whether resilience is sometimes just what survival looks like when life refuses to give you a break.

Between June 2022 and March 2025, I lost my mum.

I experienced a miscarriage.

I lost my youngest maternal uncle.

Then I lost my daughter, Mirae.

Looking back, I don’t remember feeling resilient.

I remember feeling tired.

Not physically.

Existentially.

Every time I began learning how to carry one loss, another was added to the pile.

I call this Survival Fatigue.

Not the exhaustion that comes from grief itself.

The exhaustion that comes from repeatedly rebuilding a life that keeps being dismantled.

Grief didn’t arrive in chapters.

It arrived before I’d finished reading the last one.

There is a kind of exhaustion that sleep cannot touch.

It’s not the weight of one loss.

It’s the effort of rebuilding after every one.

People would tell me how strong I was or that I am the strongest person they know.

I know they meant it kindly.

But sometimes it felt as though my ability to survive became permission for life to keep asking more of me.

Strength is often what other people call survival.

The person surviving usually calls it Tuesday.

Resilience is a strange compliment.

Because from the outside it looks like strength.

From the inside it often feels like there wasn’t another option.

I didn’t survive because I was brave.

I survived because tomorrow kept arriving.

That’s different.

Looking back, I don’t think repeated loss simply gave me more grief.

It gave me less certainty.

Every time I began adjusting to one version of myself...

Life asked me to become another.

No one tells you that repeated loss doesn’t just break your heart.

It interrupts the person you were becoming.

I became a daughter without a mother.

Then a woman learning to live after miscarriage.

Then a niece grieving another funeral.

Then a mother carrying the love of a daughter who should still be here.

I think that’s why repeated grief feels so disorientating.

You’re never only grieving the person you’ve lost.

You’re grieving the person you were becoming before life interrupted them.

Every loss asks you to become someone new...

Before you’ve finished becoming the person the last loss required.

People often ask how I stayed so strong.

I don’t think strength is the right word.

I think I simply ran out of alternatives.

Sometimes resilience isn’t courage.

Sometimes it’s grief with nowhere else to go.

I’ve realised something.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being called resilient.

I don’t want every chapter of my story to require another impossible comeback.

I don’t want to become remarkable because of what I’ve survived.

Eventually, people stop asking how you’re surviving.

They start assuming this version of you has always existed.

But it hasn’t.

It was built.

Loss after loss.

Beginning after beginning.

Goodbye after goodbye.

People admire resilience.

Few people ask what it cost to become resilient.

Every loss asks something of you.

Your attention.

Your identity.

Your energy.

Your hope.

When losses come one after another, you don’t simply carry more grief.

You carry less of yourself.

Grief isn’t only heavy because of what it takes away.

It’s heavy because every new loss asks you to become someone new.

And eventually...

You begin wondering whether there’ll ever be a version of you that gets to stay.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life proving how much I can survive.

I want a life that asks less survival of me.

I just want time.

Time to mend the pieces...

before life comes at me again.

Time to understand who I’ve become...

before I’m asked to become someone new.

Time to carry one grief...

before another arrives asking to be carried too.

Perhaps resilience isn’t what I’ve been longing for.

Perhaps I’ve simply been longing for enough time to become whole again.

Mourning rarely is.

Grief is what we carry.

Mourning is how we’re taught to show it.

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Long before we lose someone, many of us have already been taught how we’re supposed to mourn.

Stay strong. Don’t cry. Cry loudly. Stay with the family. Honour tradition.

I’ve realised something since losing my mum.

Long before we experience grief ourselves, we inherit beliefs about what grief is supposed to look like.

We inherit beliefs about strength.

About love.

About respect.

About mourning.

The problem is...

Grief rarely asks permission to follow tradition.

I grew up in an Ethiopian community where mourning wasn’t something you did alone.

When someone died, it was common for the family to hire a hall where hundreds of relatives, neighbours, friends and members of the community would come to pay their respects.

For three days, people arrived from morning until late into the evening.

Food was shared.

Prayers were said.

Stories were told.

People cried together.

No one was expected to mourn alone.

Looking back now, I can see the beauty in that tradition.

It’s a community carrying the unbearable together.

But when my mum died, I discovered something I hadn’t expected.

The way I needed to grieve didn’t look like the way I’d been taught to mourn.

For four years, I cared for my mum quietly.

Most people never saw the hardest parts.

They didn’t see the hospital appointments.

The exhaustion.

The anticipatory grief.

The thousands of tiny losses that happened long before she died.

I learnt to love my mum in private.

Then I was expected to mourn her in public.

I remember sitting in that hall feeling completely overwhelmed.

Everyone was kind.

Everyone came because they loved my mum and wanted to support us.

But I felt exposed.

As though my grief had become something people were watching.

As though everyone was looking to see how my sister and I would mourn.

Whether we cried.

Whether we stayed.

Whether we were mourning “well.”

I couldn’t stay.

My friends & partner took me away.

Not because they were pulling me away from my family.

Because they were protecting me.

They sat with me in the quiet.

In their cars.

On park benches.

Wherever I needed to fall apart without feeling observed.

Grief isn’t always easier because it’s shared.

Sometimes it’s harder because it’s witnessed.

At the time, I wondered whether I was grieving the wrong way.

Looking back, I realise I was asking the wrong question.

My grief wasn’t wrong.

It was my mourning that didn’t match the script I’d inherited.

When every culture has expectations around mourning, grieving differently can feel like failing.

Recently, someone connected to my family experienced a loss.

Like many Ethiopian families, they held the same three days of mourning.

The adult children stayed in the hall from beginning to end.

They didn’t leave to be with friends.

Afterwards, I heard family members say how proud they were.

“They did it the traditional way.”

It wasn’t said with judgement.

It was said with admiration.

But it stayed with me.

Not because those children had done anything wrong.

But because it made me realise something.

Every family teaches us what love looks like.

Many also teach us what mourning is supposed to look like.

Most of us don’t realise we’ve inherited those beliefs until we need to grieve ourselves.

Long before we experience loss, we’re handed an invisible script.

What strength looks like.

What respect looks like.

What love looks like.

What mourning should look like.

Most of us don’t realise we’re following that script until grief asks us to improvise.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether leaving that hall changed more than those three days.

I wonder whether, without anyone intending it, my grief became harder to understand.

Perhaps my leaving looked like distance.

Or disrespect.

Or independence.

When really...

I was just trying to survive.

I’ve often wondered whether that’s part of the reason I’ve felt like the black sheep in my family since my mum died.

I don’t know if those three days changed anything.

But I do know this.

Grief doesn’t just change families because someone dies.

Sometimes it changes families because everyone survives differently.

The older I get, the less interested I am in asking whether someone is grieving the “right” way.

I’m far more interested in asking another question.

Did the way they mourned help them survive?

Because survival doesn’t always look traditional.

Sometimes it looks like staying in the hall.

Sometimes it looks like stepping outside to breathe.

Sometimes it looks like crying surrounded by hundreds of people.

Sometimes it looks like crying quietly in a friend’s car.

Neither makes the love any smaller.

Neither makes the loss any less real.

Culture can give us beautiful ways to honour the people we’ve lost.

It reminds us that grief belongs in community.

That no one should have to mourn alone.

Those traditions deserve to be treasured.

Tradition can tell us how to honour the dead.

Only the grieving person knows what they need to survive the living.

Perhaps compassion isn’t asking whether someone is mourning the right way.

Perhaps compassion is making room for the way they’re already grieving.

Because grief rarely asks permission to follow tradition.

And maybe compassion shouldn’t ask it to either.

I’ve come to believe it changes the relationship we have with ourselves too.

And once that happens...

It quietly begins changing every relationship that survives them.

Especially the new ones.

Because after profound loss, love no longer feels uncomplicated.

It feels risky.

Grief doesn’t just change how we love.

It changes how safe love feels.

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I was reminded of that recently while talking to someone who had experienced another profound loss.

As we spoke, the conversation drifted away from the person who had died and towards someone who was still very much alive.

The man she was dating.

Everything she said suggested he was kind.

Patient.

Compassionate.

Someone who genuinely cared for her.

Yet she kept finding herself pushing him away.

Not because she didn’t like him.

Because she was terrified of needing him.

She wondered whether she was staying because she truly wanted to, or because he’d been there for her through the loss.

She hated feeling vulnerable.

She hated the idea that someone else could become so important to her.

Listening to her, I realised I already knew that feeling.

Four years ago, after my mum died, I remember saying something to my partner that I’ve never forgotten.

I told him he didn’t have to stay.

I gave him an out.

Not because I wanted him to leave.

Because I genuinely believed life with me had become too difficult.

I thought my grief would become his burden.

I thought I’d need too much.

Lean too much.

Cry too much.

I couldn’t imagine anyone willingly choosing a life that included the version of me grief had created.

Looking back, I don’t think grief simply made me sad.

It changed the story I believed about myself.

Before my mum died, I believed I was someone worth leaning on.

Afterwards, I became convinced I was someone people would eventually grow tired of carrying.

Perhaps that’s one of grief’s cruellest tricks.

It doesn’t just change how we see ourselves.

It changes how we imagine everyone else sees us too.

Looking back, I realise something.

I wasn’t protecting him from my grief.

I was protecting myself from needing him.

Looking back, I realise I wasn’t making a decision about my relationship.

I was responding to the story grief had written about who I’d become.

Grief has a way of convincing us that if someone gets close enough...

We’ll eventually lose them too.

So we begin negotiating with loss before it has even happened.

We expect people to leave.

We prepare ourselves for disappointment.

Grief teaches us to rehearse goodbyes before anyone has even gone.

Sometimes we push people away before they’ve even had the chance to stay.

I used to think grief made people cling tighter.

Now I wonder if it often does the opposite.

Sometimes grief doesn’t make us afraid of losing people.

It makes us afraid of needing them.

Because needing someone means giving them the power to hurt you.

Not intentionally.

Simply by no longer being there.

After you’ve experienced profound loss, vulnerability changes.

Before grief, vulnerability means someone might reject you.

After grief, vulnerability means someone might become irreplaceable.

That’s a much scarier thing to risk.

I convinced myself I’d be better off alone.

If I expected nothing from anyone, nobody could disappoint me.

Nobody could leave.

Nobody could become another person I’d one day have to grieve.

Loneliness can feel safer than love when you’ve learned how much love can hurt.

It felt safer.

But grief often mistakes self-protection for healing.

My partner couldn’t bring my mum back.

He couldn’t take away my grief.

He couldn’t carry it for me.

No one can.

But he quietly taught me something grief had almost made me forget.

That love isn’t measured by whether someone can fix your pain.

Sometimes it’s measured by whether they choose to stay alongside it.

He never asked me to stop grieving.

He never made me feel like I was too much.

He simply kept showing up.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Consistency became the language grief trusted.

Looking back, I realise I wasn’t asking him to leave because I loved him less.

I was asking him to leave because grief had convinced me I was too much to stay for.

Perhaps that’s another lie grief tells us.

That our pain makes us harder to love.

Grief has a way of confusing being changed with being unlovable.

I’ve stopped believing that.

Because the people who truly love us don’t stay because grief is easy.

They stay because love was never built on the promise of easy.

It was built on the willingness to remain.

Perhaps that’s why grief changes every relationship that survives it.

Not because it makes us love less.

But because it changes what love asks us to risk.

Can I believe someone will stay...

Even after I’ve learned what it feels like when someone can’t?

And maybe healing isn’t finding certainty that nobody else will ever leave.

Perhaps healing isn’t learning to stop needing people.

Perhaps it’s slowly believing that needing someone isn’t the same as losing them.

Looking back, I don’t think my partner changed my grief.

He challenged the story grief had taught me about myself.

Sometimes healing doesn’t begin when the pain disappears.

Sometimes it begins when we stop believing every story grief tells us.

Not because they love you less.

Because they assume you’ve learned to live without the person you lost.

But learning to live without someone isn’t the same as no longer missing them.

We assume that because someone’s grief has become quieter, it has become lighter.

I’m no longer convinced those are the same thing.

Grief didn’t become lighter.

People just became more familiar with seeing me carry it.

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Recently, my partner and I had a difficult conversation.

We were supposed to spend the day with his family so they could spend time with our son.

Normally, I go.

His family have welcomed me with so much love, and watching them build a relationship with my little boy genuinely warms my heart.

This weekend, I couldn’t.

I was physically exhausted.

Emotionally drained.

Running on very little sleep.

But underneath all of that was something much harder to explain.

Every weekend, I watch my son laugh with his grandparents.

Every cuddle.

Every smile.

Every milestone.

It fills me with joy.

And at exactly the same time, it reminds me of everything my mum will never get to experience.

She’ll never hold him.

She’ll never make him laugh.

She’ll never tell me I’m doing a good job when motherhood feels impossibly hard.

She would have been the grandmother who never left my side.

The happiest moments often reveal the deepest absences.

When I tried to explain this to my partner, he asked why I hadn’t told him it still felt so difficult.

I know why he asked.

He loves me.

He wanted to fix something that couldn’t be fixed.

But grief doesn’t work like that.

Some grief cannot be solved.

It can only be witnessed.

No conversation can bring my mum back.

No amount of understanding can give my son the grandmother he’ll never know.

And maybe that’s one of the hardest things about loving someone who’s grieving.

You eventually realise there are wounds you cannot heal.

Only weights you can help someone carry.

Sometimes love isn’t solving the pain.

Sometimes it’s simply making room for it.

After our conversation, I realised something else.

His question wasn’t really about me.

It revealed something much bigger.

It’s been four years since my mum died.

People don’t ask about her as often anymore.

They don’t check in around every milestone.

They don’t wonder whether Mother’s Day feels difficult.

Life has moved forward.

Naturally.

The calendar moved on.

My relationship with my mum didn’t.

I don’t wake up every morning announcing that I miss her.

I don’t explain every weekend why watching grandparents with my son hurts.

I don’t tell people every time another reminder catches me off guard.

Not because the grief has disappeared.

Because explaining it every day is exhausting.

Silence isn’t the absence of grief.

It’s often the exhaustion of explaining it.

I don’t need people to constantly ask if I’m okay.

I don’t need sympathy every weekend.

I don’t need every family gathering to become about my loss.

I just need people to stop mistaking my silence for healing.

We mistake composure for healing.

We mistake laughter for acceptance.

We mistake routine for recovery.

But grief doesn’t disappear between conversations.

It doesn’t only appear on anniversaries.

It doesn’t wait politely for birthdays or funerals.

It quietly follows us into ordinary Saturdays.

Into family lunches.

Into watching your child reach another milestone.

Into every beautiful moment that reminds you who’s missing.

Grief doesn’t stay where the loss happened.

It quietly reshapes the life that survives it.

The loss becomes part of your story.

But it never stops being part of your life.

People see you working.

Parenting.

Laughing.

Showing up.

They see the version of you that has learned how to function.

They rarely see the effort it takes to do all of those things while quietly carrying someone you love.

Maybe that’s why so much grief advice misses the mark.

We’re told time heals.

We’re told to move on.

We’re told healing means the pain should fade.

I think we’ve been asking the wrong question.

Instead of asking,

“Why are you still grieving?”

Perhaps we should be asking,

“How have you learned to carry it?”

Because healing has never meant that I stopped missing my mum.

Healing has meant learning to build a life around a love that never had anywhere else to go.

The greatest kindness isn’t asking someone if they’re grieving.

It’s remembering they probably still are.

Because the hardest part isn’t carrying grief.

It’s carrying it so well that people forget it’s there.

“You seem pretty sad for someone who thought she was getting better.”

I recognised myself in that sentence more than I wanted to.

That sentence stayed with me for days.

It made me realise I’d been measuring healing by the wrong thing.

One of the biggest misconceptions about grief is that it only appears when we’re thinking about the person we’ve lost.

My experience has been very different.

Grief doesn’t just change how we remember people.

It changes how we love the people who are still here.

Another myth?

That grief only belongs in conversations about death.

I’ve learned it quietly follows us into ordinary life.

Into our marriages.

Into our friendships.

Into the way we parent.

Into the way we argue.

Into the way we hear criticism.

Grief doesn’t stay where the loss happened.

It reshapes every relationship that survives it.

I’ve noticed something about myself.

Whenever I argue with someone I love, my grief becomes louder.

Not during the argument.

Afterwards.

When the house is quiet.

That’s when I cry.

That’s when I miss my mum.

That’s when I think about Mirae.

That’s when every loss I’ve ever experienced seems to arrive all at once.

For years, I thought those moments meant I wasn’t healing.

Now I think they’re showing me something else.

I’ve started thinking about grief as a backpack.

Most days I carry it without noticing.

I’ve become stronger.

More experienced.

I’ve learned how to walk with its weight.

But then something shakes it.

An argument.

A sleepless night.

A milestone.

A song.

And suddenly every compartment opens.

My mum.

My daughter, Mirae.

The future I imagined.

The grandmother my son will never know.

The daughter who should be watching her little brother grow.

The backpack didn’t suddenly become heavier.

Something simply reminded me I was carrying it.

Whenever we argue, my mind isn’t really shouting,

“Listen to me.”

It’s shouting,

“Can’t you see how much I’m already carrying?”

“Can’t you see I’m carrying my mum?”

“Can’t you see I’m carrying my daughter?”

“Can’t you see I’m learning to mother one child while grieving another?”

“Can’t you see I’m trying to navigate motherhood without my own mum?”

I’m not asking the people I love to fix my grief.

I’m asking them to notice it.

To understand that I never arrive empty-handed.

Every difficult conversation begins with a backpack they cannot see.

I’ve realised grief doesn’t just change what we carry.

It changes what we long for.

I don’t long to win the argument.

I long for grace.

For someone to pause before assuming I’m angry.

For someone to choose curiosity before criticism.

For someone to recognise that grief, exhaustion and longing are often standing beside me in conversations they cannot see.

Sometimes I’m not asking you to agree with me.

I’m asking you to notice how much I’m already carrying.

Because when you’ve experienced profound loss, ordinary life is rarely ordinary.

An argument isn’t just an argument.

It’s missing your mum when your baby is poorly.

It’s wondering what kind of sister your daughter would have been.

It’s grieving the grandmother your son will never know.

It’s carrying the invisible weight of a life that didn’t unfold the way you imagined.

People often think grief is triggered by anniversaries.

Sometimes it is.

But more often I’ve found it waiting in ordinary moments.

A supermarket aisle.

A family gathering.

A milestone.

An argument.

Not because those moments are bigger.

Because grief doesn't stay in the past. It quietly reshapes everything that comes after it.

Maybe that’s why so much grief advice misses the mark.

We’re told grief gets easier with time.

We’re told to move on.

We’re told healing means the pain should fade.

But what if grief was never meant to stay neatly in the past?

What if it quietly follows us into every relationship we’re still trying to protect?

I kept waiting for the backpack to disappear.

Instead, I’ve learned that healing isn’t the absence of the backpack.

It’s learning how to carry it.

Some days the weight shifts unexpectedly.

Some days I cry over something that, on the surface, has nothing to do with grief.

I’ve stopped seeing those moments as failures.

They aren’t proof I’ve gone backwards.

They’re proof that grief continues to shape the life I’m still living.

Perhaps that’s what I want the people I love to understand.

Not that I need them to carry my backpack.

No one can.

But sometimes...

I need them to notice it.

To walk a little slower beside me.

To offer grace before judgement.

Curiosity before criticism.

Compassion before conclusions.

People see the reaction.

They rarely see what the reaction is carrying.

Maybe loving someone who’s grieving isn’t about having the perfect words.

Maybe it’s about remembering they’re carrying something you cannot see.

And sometimes, the kindest thing you can do is notice the backpack before you judge the person carrying it.

“One day it will need you less, and maybe you won’t be ready for that, either.”

That single sentence stayed with me and became the starting point for this piece. If you don’t already follow them, I highly recommend reading their work.

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At first, I thought it was about grief.

Now I think it’s about love.

Because one of the strangest parts of grief is that when it begins to quieten, many of us don’t feel relief.

We feel guilty.

One of grief’s cruellest tricks is convincing us that healing is a form of betrayal.

We wonder if we’re forgetting.

If we’re moving on too quickly.

If laughing means loving less.

As though the intensity of our grief somehow proves the intensity of our love.

I don’t think we talk about that enough.

Sometimes we hold on to our pain because it feels like the last place our relationship still exists.

If the grief softens, we worry the connection might soften too.

Looking back, I wonder how many of my own behaviours were rooted in that fear.

Not consciously.

But quietly.

I remember laughing one afternoon.

A real laugh.

The kind that catches you by surprise.

And almost immediately afterwards, I felt guilty.

Not because I’d done anything wrong.

But because, for a split second, I wasn’t thinking about my mum or my daughter.

It felt as though my grief had stepped out of the room.

And instead of feeling relieved, I felt afraid.

Afraid that if grief became quieter, my love might too.

I even wonder how often we mistake survival strategies for grief itself.

Sometimes we isolate because connection feels exhausting.

Sometimes we overwork because stillness leaves too much room for grief.

Sometimes we stop caring for ourselves because part of us believes healing would mean leaving someone behind.

Not because we want to suffer.

But because suffering can feel like evidence that our love still exists.

Sometimes we mistake staying in pain for staying connected.

Grief doesn’t always keep us close to the people we’ve lost.

Sometimes it keeps us away from the people who are still here.

Perhaps that’s why healing can feel so frightening.

If I smile more...

If I stop crying every day...

If I begin to enjoy my life again...

Who am I becoming?

And what does that say about the person I’ve lost?

Who benefits from me staying broken?

Certainly not the people I love.

And probably not the people I’ve lost.

Maybe that’s because I’ve been asking myself the wrong question.

Not,

“How do I stop grieving?”

But,

“What if grief isn’t what keeps my relationship alive?”

Because perhaps it never was.

Perhaps love has been doing that all along.

Not through tears.

Not through guilt.

Not through staying broken.

But through the way I still speak about them.

The recipes I still cook.

The values I carry because she, my mum, taught them to me.

The mother I’m becoming because she was mine.

Perhaps grief was never the proof that I loved deeply.

Love was.

Grief was simply what love looked like when they first left.

Now love looks different.

It shows up in memory.

In values.

In traditions.

In the people we’re becoming because they were part of us.

Perhaps the goal was never to keep grief alive.

Perhaps the goal is to let love find new places to live.

Because grief may become quieter.

But love never does.

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Yesterday marked four years since my mum died.

Four years.

Long enough that people assume the grief has softened.
Long enough that the anniversary doesn’t appear in anyone else’s calendar.
Long enough that the world has quietly moved on.

One of the things people often say about grief is that time heals all wounds.

I understand why they say it.

It’s comforting.
Hopeful, even.

But after four years, I’ve come to realise something different.

People say time heals all wounds.

But grief was never a wound.

It was love with nowhere to go.

That love didn’t disappear when my mum died.

It simply lost its place to land.

And perhaps that’s why grief feels so confusing.

We spend so much time talking about healing that we rarely talk about what it means to continue loving someone who is no longer here.

What surprised me this year wasn’t the anniversary itself.

It was everything that came before it.

In the days leading up to it, I found myself reliving those final moments.

Replaying conversations.

Remembering details I thought I’d forgotten.

Imagining what I would do if I could have those last few days with my mum again.

The advice I would ask for.

The things I would tell her.

The things I never got to say.

I was moodier than usual.

Snapping at my partner over things that didn’t really matter.

Emotionally drained.

Trying to be present for my son while feeling pulled somewhere else entirely.

Smiling with him during the day and crying after he went to sleep.

I wasn’t grieving the anniversary.

I was grieving the impossibility of one more conversation.

And perhaps that’s what anniversaries really do.

They don’t just remind us that someone died.

They remind us that time kept moving without them.

Yesterday served as a reminder that I am now further away from the last time I heard my mum’s voice.

Further away from our last conversation.

Further away from the version of life where she was still here.

The hardest thing about anniversaries is that they measure two losses at once:

The time since they left.

And the time you haven’t had with them.

Perhaps the heaviest part of this year wasn’t the anniversary itself.

It was the reminder that I am learning how to be a mother without my mum.

Mothers play such a significant role in their grandchildren’s lives.

And there are moments when her absence feels impossible to ignore.

When my son had the flu recently, I found myself reaching for my phone.

Not to call a doctor.

To call my mum.

To ask what she would do.

To hear one of her old remedies.

To be reassured by someone who had done this before.

Instead, I found myself searching Google.

Looking for answers that should have come from her.

It’s strange how grief can hide in moments like that.

Not in the big milestones.

But in the ordinary moments of motherhood when you realise the person you need most isn’t here.

Every milestone my son reaches contains two emotions.

Joy that he is here.

Sadness that she isn’t.

Sometimes I think about the grandmother she would have been.

The way she would have held him.

The things she would have taught him.

The stories she would have told.

And then I remember that all I have are my imaginings.

Because grief doesn’t just take away the person.

It takes away the future you thought you would have with them.

This year brought another realisation too.

Apart from my sister, nobody in my family called to check how I was doing.

No one asked how the anniversary felt.

No one asked what I needed.

And perhaps that’s partly cultural.

In my culture, grief is often carried quietly.

When my mum died, we were told not to cry at her funeral.

The belief was that too much crying disturbs the peace of the person who has passed.

Even this year, my sister gently reminded me that we shouldn’t cry because it isn’t good for our mum.

I understand where that belief comes from.

I understand the love behind it.

But I also find myself questioning it.

Because how do you lose someone you love deeply and not cry?

How do you mourn silently when your whole world has changed?

How do you stop tears that arrive without permission?

Perhaps one of the loneliest parts of grief is not the crying.

It’s feeling like you’re supposed to do it quietly.

For a long time, I thought healing meant finding my way back to who I was before.

Back to the daughter I had been when my mum was alive.

Back to the version of life that felt familiar.

But grief doesn’t work that way.

The goal was never to become who I was before the loss.

That version of me left with her.

Loss changed me.

Not just emotionally, but fundamentally.

The way I see family.

The way I love.

The way I mother.

The way I move through the world.

Because the hardest part of grief wasn’t losing my mum.

It was learning how to live in a world where she no longer existed.

A world where I could no longer call her.

Ask her advice.

Share good news.

Hear her voice.

That world still feels unfamiliar sometimes.

Even after four years.

People often ask whether grief gets lighter.

I don’t think that’s quite the right question.

People think grief gets lighter with time.

What actually happens is that your life grows around the weight.

You keep loving.

You keep showing up.

You keep living.

Not because the grief disappeared.

But because your life became large enough to hold both the grief and everything else.

That’s what the fourth year has taught me.

Four years later, I don’t miss my mum less.

I’ve simply become more experienced at missing her.

And perhaps that is what grief asks of us.

Not to let go.

Not to move on.

But to learn how to carry love in a different form.

Not because I didn’t understand them, but because I believed they came with consequences, and in my life, those consequences felt real. Boundaries were never abstract or neutral. They sat inside families, communities, histories, and losses.

I’ve had many conversations, particularly with African and Caribbean friends, about how the idea of setting or enforcing boundaries to protect oneself can feel almost foreign. Families are messy. Love is often used to justify overstepping. Offence is taken when you deny people the opportunity to show up, especially when the issue isn’t whether they show up, but how. When people are only willing to show up on their own terms, not in the ways you actually need.

In these contexts, boundaries are not neutral acts. They are relational, cultural, and often costly. They can be misunderstood, resisted, or quietly punished.

Recently, I’ve been more honest with people who hurt me or silenced me. More honest about how hard life has been. About grief that hasn’t softened with time. About what it felt like to lose my mother, and later my daughter, and to feel unseen, particularly within my own community and family.

I think part of me believed that because these people loved me, if I finally spoke clearly enough, they would see my pain. That honesty would be met with care. That something would shift.

It didn’t.

I was told I was loved. I was told people cared. But there was very little action that confirmed this to be true. No real presence. No meaningful repair. Just distance.

There is a story we’re often told about boundaries, that once we speak up, the world responds. That honesty leads to change. That courage is rewarded. That naming harm automatically leads to healing.

But sometimes nothing changes externally.

And that can feel devastating, especially when speaking up has already cost so much.

What I’m slowly learning is that boundaries don’t always exist to change other people. Sometimes they exist to change us.

Even when it was hard.
Even when it triggered discomfort or defensiveness in others.
Even when it didn’t lead to the outcome I hoped for.

I spoke my truth.

That matters, even if it wasn’t met well.

There was a time when silence was the safest option for me. When my grief was so raw after my mother died that I couldn’t risk losing anyone else by naming how much I was hurting. When confrontation wasn’t healing, it was a genuine threat to survival. Silence, then, wasn’t avoidance. It was protection.

But I’m not the same woman I was then.

Grief has changed me on what feels like a cellular level. Time hasn’t erased the losses, but it has shifted what I can carry and what I can no longer tolerate. Recently, I realised that staying silent was hurting me more than speaking ever could.

So I spoke, not to provoke change, not to force repair, but to stop disappearing inside myself.

This is the part of boundary work that doesn’t get talked about enough. Sometimes the boundary doesn’t repair the relationship. Sometimes it doesn’t bring people closer. Sometimes it simply reveals what was already missing.

And still, it can be the right thing.

Right now, my aim isn’t resolution. It isn’t reconciliation at all costs. It isn’t forcing others to meet me where I am.

My aim is quieter and harder:
to protect my peace.
to live in alignment with who I’ve become.
to stop contorting myself for love that doesn’t know how to show up.

Boundaries, for me, are no longer about bravery as performance. They’re about timing, safety, and self-respect, even when the outcome is disappointing, incomplete, or quiet.

Sometimes the world doesn’t change.

But we do.

And sometimes, that has to be enough.

When I first learned about it, it stayed with me. The idea that something could be shattered, pieced back together, and somehow made more beautiful, not despite the break, but because of it, felt deeply personal.

On the anniversary of my mum’s passing, my partner and I went to a kintsugi class. We each chose a bowl to break and mend. When mine cracked, I felt a lump rise in my throat; it looked exactly how I had felt for so long: split open, fragile, unfinished.

I decided to dedicate that bowl to her. As I filled the cracks with gold, I imagined all the ways she had shaped me, how much of her still lives in me, even through the pain. When the bowl was finished, it didn’t look new. It looked whole in a different way.
Now it sits in my living room, in pride of place. A physical reminder of the practice, of how beauty can coexist with brokenness. Yes, it is the bowl in the picture!

Grief often feels like something that needs to be fixed.
We tell ourselves we’ll “get better” or “move on.” People praise us for being strong, for functioning, for not crying too much.
But what if the goal isn’t to be fixed?
What if it’s to be remade?

The cracks we carry tell the story of what we’ve survived.
They hold the lessons, the love, the ache.
They remind us of who we’ve lost, and how deeply we loved them.

The gold, I think, is what we choose to fill them with.

For me, that’s looked like:

• Speaking my mum's and Mirae’s names often, even when people avoid them.

• Allowing myself to cry when I need to, not just when it’s “acceptable.”

• Writing, here, in this space, to give language to what once felt impossible to say.

• Finding purpose in my pain, in training to become a counsellor so I can help others navigate what once broke me.

• Walking, creating, remembering.

• Surrounding myself with people who let me grieve without needing to fix me.

• And, most importantly, giving myself grace for still being here.

These are my gold seams. They don’t erase the cracks; they remind me that I am still becoming. What are some of your gold seams?

Honouring our brokenness doesn’t mean glorifying pain.
It means recognising the courage it takes to live with it, to let it change you, soften you, and still choose to love anyway.

Maybe grief doesn’t leave us broken.
Maybe it leaves us marked.
And those marks, those golden lines that trace where we’ve been shattered, are proof that we lived, that we loved, and that we kept going.

Like kintsugi, we are not restored to what we were before.
We are reimagined, stronger, softer, and somehow, still whole.

I’ve heard that line more times than I can count. It’s meant with love, but it carries a quiet cruelty, the suggestion that something as profound as grief can be undone by something new. But anyone who’s lived through loss knows: it doesn’t fade. You just learn to live around it.

Over time, I’ve watched a few women in my circle walk through pregnancy after loss; each with her own way of surviving the in-between, that space where grief and hope meet. Their stories are different, but the thread that ties them together is courage.

1. The One Who Counted Every Kick

She knew fear intimately. Every flutter, every quiet stretch of stillness sent her heart racing. She was counting kicks like lifelines, tracking every movement even during conversations, aware of every change.

There was never a question of whether she should go to the hospital; she was prepared to, always. She kept her circle small, holding her pregnancy close and sacred. Faith became her anchor, fasting, praying, listening to sermons and gospel music that reminded her she wasn’t alone.

Her anxiety showed in the choices she made: no baby shower, a late announcement, quiet celebrations. But she did what she had to do to bring her beautiful baby boy safely into the world. Faith was how she held on when logic and reassurance weren’t enough.

I am so immensely proud of her for feeling her feelings and for being unapologetic in what she needed to get through one of the hardest seasons of her life.

2. The One Who’s Afraid, But Still Preparing

Another friend, now past the halfway mark in her pregnancy, says she still can’t bring herself to buy anything. Folding tiny clothes, choosing a buggy, it understandably feels too hopeful, too much like tempting fate.

And yet, she’s planning a baby shower. It’s tender, it’s brave, she’s showing up, still here, still trying. She’s choosing to honour her baby boy while still carrying the memory of the baby girl she lost, proof that grief and love can share the same heartbeat.

Every purchase, every plan, every smile may come with a heartbeat of hesitation. But she’s doing it, inch by inch, letting joy back in through the cracks of fear.

She’s already picked a beautiful name, a small act of courage that many parents after loss can’t bring themselves to do until their baby is safely in their arms. To me? It’s a beautiful way of saying, “I believe you’ll be here.” It’s a bond built on love instead of fear.

I am so immensely proud of her for letting herself feel both excitement and fear, for not rushing her healing (especially this!), for choosing connection even when it feels risky, and for finding small ways to honour the hope that lives alongside her grief.

3. The One Who’s Choosing Radical Faith

Then there’s the third friend.

She’s been in a season of grief for years, long enough to know that control is a myth. She’s operating out of what she calls “blind, childlike faith.” It’s not strength, it’s survival.

It’s not that she isn’t scared. It’s that she’s tired of living in fear. When she bled in early pregnancy, she didn’t rush to the hospital. She waited, quietly whispering, “Whatever is meant to be, will be, & God will cover us.”

What people don’t see is her quiet research, the way she checks what’s normal and what isn’t, learning when to panic and when not to. She’s not careless. She’s cautious in her own way, learning to trust her instincts this time around.

Last time, she listened to others who told her “just have faith”, even when she knew deep down something was wrong. But as she says now, “faith without works is dead.” This time, she’s meeting faith halfway, balancing prayer with preparation, surrender with awareness.

She knows what could happen. She knows how loss feels. And yet, she’s daring to hope that maybe, just maybe, life will go her way this time.

What others mistake for peace is really practice, a decision, every day, to keep walking forward with both fear and faith in her hands.

I am so immensely proud of her for finding her own version of faith, for choosing courage over comfort, and for allowing herself to believe that good things might still find her.

People mean well, but the advice they offer often misses the point.
“Just have faith.”
“Try not to worry.”
“It’s early days.”
“You can always buy the big things later.”

But unless you’ve sat in a hospital room and heard the words “I’m sorry, but there is no heartbeat,” you don’t get a say on how we should feel.
Unless you’ve had to return the buggy you so lovingly picked out for the baby you’ll never bring home, you don’t get a say on what we should do or when we should do it.
Unless you’ve felt the kicks stop and whispered every prayer you know on the way to the hospital, only to be told it’s too late, with all due respect, just shut up and let us lead.

Pregnancy after loss is laced with fear, anxiety, and cautious optimism. It’s waking up every day and choosing to believe in a future that your body and heart once taught you to doubt. It’s learning to breathe through the uncertainty, to feel the fear and do it anyway.

Most people see pregnancy as joy, anticipation, and nesting.
For mothers who’ve lost, it’s all of that and survival.
It’s spiritual warfare, hope fighting despair, faith wrestling with memory.

People assume that a new baby will somehow dull the pain of the one you lost. But a baby after loss isn’t a replacement. They’re not a redo, or a fix, or a second chance to “get it right.”
They’re their own person, with a different name, a different story, a different heartbeat.

And that’s how it should be.
Because love for one child doesn’t cancel love for another.

If and when I hold a living, breathing baby in my arms, that love will live beside Mirae’s, not instead of it. My home might be louder one day, but her presence will always fill the quiet.

All three of my babies belong in my story, two taken too soon, and one who will grow up knowing they have older siblings watching over them.

To my friends, and to every woman walking this road, I am so deeply proud of you. You are doing something extraordinary. You are daring to hope again, even when hope feels fragile. You are proof that courage can exist alongside fear, that love doesn’t disappear when loss enters the room. You are the definition of strength, not because you’ve moved on, but because you keep showing up, even when it hurts.

Pregnancy after loss isn’t just about a new life. It’s about faith in the face of heartbreak, love that refuses to die, and hope, trembling, defiant, and persistent, finding its way back in.

To every mother trying again: you are the embodiment of grace. You don’t need to be fearless to be faithful. You’re allowed to protect your heart, to move gently, to take it one breath at a time. Pregnancy after loss isn’t a test of strength; it’s an act of survival. And survival, in itself, is something to be proud of.

Some of us are told to be strong.
Some are told not to question God.
Some are told to cry quietly, or not at all.
And some are told to carry on like nothing happened, as if the act of survival alone is enough to honour the dead.

Across African, Caribbean, Asian, and Middle Eastern communities, grief often sits within the framework of respect, strength, and faith. We’re taught that loud sorrow can be a sign of weakness. That vulnerability makes others uncomfortable. That to grieve “well” is to keep your pain dignified, contained.

But what happens when your grief doesn’t fit the rules?

What happens when your pain is louder, longer, messier, or refuses to stay quiet?

For many of us, that’s when isolation begins. Because while culture can give us belonging, it can also create pressure to grieve the right way.
The way our mothers did.
The way our community expects.
The way that keeps everyone else comfortable.

And yet, grief has never been one-size-fits-all.
It doesn’t care for timelines or appearances. It doesn’t care what’s appropriate. It shows up in bursts, in laughter at the wrong time, in silence when words won’t come, in tears that arrive years later, when everyone else has moved on.

For a lot of us, the tension between personal pain and cultural expectation creates a second kind of loss, the loss of being seen in our grief.
You begin to edit your emotions to match what’s acceptable. You apologise for crying “too much.” You swallow the parts of your pain that feel inconvenient for others.

It’s not that our cultures mean harm. In many ways, those rules were born from survival, a way to hold dignity when the world didn’t give it freely. They taught our ancestors how to keep moving through unbearable pain. But in teaching strength, they often forgot softness.

And that’s what many of us are now trying to reclaim.

We can honour our traditions without inheriting silence.
We can believe in faith and still have questions.
We can be strong and still fall apart.

There is no one right way to grieve, not by culture, not by community, not by anyone else’s measure.

Grief is deeply personal, and it deserves space to look and sound however it needs to.

So maybe the new tradition is this:
To grieve honestly.
To let it be loud or quiet, raw or still.
To make room for others to do the same, without judgment, without comparison, without shame.

Because the truest honour we can give to those we’ve lost, and to the cultures that raised us, is to make sure that in grief, we remain human.

There were families everywhere, mums, dads, grandparents, children, even dogs trotting alongside, all there because their lives had been touched by a baby who never got to stay.
It was a beautiful day, gentle and heavy at the same time.

There was a singer with a guitar whose voice seemed to carry every parent’s ache.
There were poems read aloud by mothers, quiet sobs between verses, a few speeches, and stories that reminded everyone how fragile and precious life really is.

I thought I wouldn’t cry, but I did.
A few lines into one of the poems, the same one I had wanted to read at Mirae’s funeral, my throat closed up. I couldn’t stop the tears from coming.

It felt strange and comforting at once, standing among strangers who all somehow understood.
There was this quiet recognition in every glance, the kind that says, “I know this pain. I’ve carried it too.”

When I tied Mirae’s name onto the baby loss tree, surrounded by hundreds of other names, it broke my heart. Seeing them flutter in the wind, so many babies loved, remembered, and missed, was overwhelming. It was a visual reminder of how widespread this kind of loss is, how many families carry invisible grief every single day.

What struck me most wasn’t just the number of names, but the years they represented.
Some of the messages were decades old.
Women who lost their babies 10, 20, 30 years ago still come to these walks, still write their child’s name, still cry. It showed me that grief doesn’t vanish with time; it changes shape, but it never truly leaves.

And yet, there was beauty in that, too.
Because here, in this space, no one had to pretend they were over it.
No one had to minimise their loss or apologise for remembering.
No one had to hide their tears or worry that their sadness made others uncomfortable.

For once, grief wasn’t something to push down.
It was allowed to exist.
It was witnessed.
It was shared.

Places like this, walks like this, matter so much.
They remind us that we’re not alone, that our babies’ names can still be spoken, that it’s okay to hold onto love and grief at the same time.
They permit us to show up as we are, no matter how many years have passed, no matter how messy it still feels.

Beyond the walk itself, Sands has given me something I never knew I needed: a community. The face-to-face meetings, the online groups, the quiet messages that turn into long conversations… that’s where I found my tribe.
One of those women, someone who held my hand (literally and emotionally) from week six after losing Mirae to this very day, I can’t imagine my life without her now. The fact that we even met is because Sands exists, because this space was created for mothers like us to find each other in the fog.

When the songs ended and people slowly began to leave, I stood by the tree one last time.
The leaves rustled gently, and the ribbons with each baby’s name swayed together.
I imagined them all, the little lives we carry in memory, dancing together in the soft wind.

It reminded me that grief doesn’t always have to be isolating.
Sometimes it can connect.
Sometimes it can hold us all in the same quiet space, broken, but still standing.

“You are responsible for changing something, not because you’re to blame, but because you are the only person who can do something about it.”

She was talking about trauma, but the words hit me right in the chest.

I scrolled through the comments and saw people saying they used depression as a form of safety, that it became familiar, predictable, and protective. That line sat with me for days because I realised that grief can feel the same way too.

Since losing my mum and my daughter, Mirae, I’ve felt like there’s a cloud that follows me everywhere I go. Whether I’m laughing or crying, surrounded by people or completely alone, it’s just there. Hovering. Heavy.

Grief changes your baseline. It becomes the quiet backdrop of everything you do. Even joy feels different now. It’s softer, cautious, like it knows it could disappear at any moment. I’ve noticed that I check out a lot. I procrastinate. I show up fully when I’m with others, but when I’m alone, it’s like I disappear into myself.

Dr Feldman Barrett talks about anxiety and depression as predictive errors, moments when your brain is trying to protect you from what it thinks might hurt. It prepares you for danger before it even happens. Maybe grief does the same thing.

Perhaps my brain has learned that love and loss often come hand in hand, that joy always has a price. So now it tries to keep me safe by keeping me low. It tells me not to expect too much, not to dream too big, not to relax too deeply, because it’s safer not to feel everything at once.

The darkness starts to feel like the only place you can breathe.
It’s awful, but it’s familiar.
And sometimes familiar feels safer than hope.

But what I’m slowly realising is this: staying there doesn’t keep them closer. It doesn’t honour them either. It just keeps me stuck.

Grief can trick you into thinking you’re protecting yourself, when really you’re just pausing your life, holding your breath in case joy betrays you again.

I’m not blaming myself for it. Like Dr Feldman Barrett said, responsibility isn’t about blame, it’s about choice. I can’t control what I’ve lost. But maybe I can decide how much longer I let the darkness be my safety net.

Right now, I don’t have the energy to overhaul my life or reinvent myself. But I can start noticing when I disappear. We can all start. I can start gently pulling myself back, into the world, into my body, into the present.

That’s the work. That’s the step.

Recently, I saw a clip online of a girl talking to a stranger about her struggles. She said she doesn’t tell her friends or family what she’s going through anymore because she doesn’t want to be “the grieving girl” all the time.
And the stranger replied, “If that’s what keeps you here, keep talking about it.”

That line broke me a little, because I felt it. Talking about grief, writing about it, naming it, it doesn’t make me stuck in it. It keeps me here. It keeps me connected.

Maybe that’s what this space is for. For people who are tired of being quiet about their grief. For those who are still learning how to carry it without being consumed by it.

Maybe grief isn’t meant to be conquered or outgrown. Maybe it’s something we learn to live alongside, without letting it be the only place we exist.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s what healing quietly looks like.

If you’re part of this community, if you’ve found your way here through heartbreak, loss, or love that had nowhere to go, I hope you know you don’t have to climb out of the darkness alone.

Here, we’re not rushing to fix each other. We’re learning how to hold space for the ache, the quiet wins, the small returns to life.

So, if you recognise yourself in this, the cloud, the numbness, the constant tug between surviving and showing up, tell me: what helps you come back to yourself, even for a moment?

Because maybe that’s what this space is for.
To remind each other, softly, that the darkness doesn’t get to have the final word.