I thought 10 months in, things would be different. Honestly, I envisioned I would be more grounded in my life and this whole parenthood thing. Most days, though, I have to come up with a plan simply to get through the day. Sometimes moment by moment. This is not what I expected.

It feels similar to when I went through my process with Jake. I also did not envision becoming a widow and being a full-time caregiver, also sleep deprived, but that is what happened.

I remember how hypervigilant I was at night with him, always listening, always aware of what was happening with his breathing and his body. It feels awfully familiar when I have those nights with my son now. My heart is racing, my mind is full of thoughts, and I feel I am not doing a good enough job as a caregiver.

It is so hard to give so much of yourself, even if you are choosing it. You just aren’t the same ever again. You look at and think about the world differently. You see yourself differently. There is a before and after, and sometimes I don’t know how to reconcile the two versions of myself. I am still me, but I also feel so far away from the person I was.

I thought at this place in my life I would feel like, “I made it,” but I don’t even feel close to that. It’s not that I’m not grateful for where I am at and what I have built, but I guess I thought I would feel differently. I didn’t think I would feel this exhausted and this sad about how exhausted I feel and somehow have to keep up.

I noticed recently I have this part of myself that likes to imagine life in a way that can bring me comfort or peace. I created an image in my mind and I put myself there. It gives me a place to go in my mind where I can feel like myself. Because the truth is, I don’t know who I am now. Especially with the sleep deprivation. There are days I feel I am floating through life as a ghost. I haven’t ever felt it to this extent before.

And maybe that is why I create these places in my mind. They remind me that there is still a part of me in there somewhere.

I thought I would feel like I had arrived somewhere by now. Instead, I am exhausted, I don’t recognize myself, and my body is remembering a kind of caregiving I thought I had already lived through.

Caregiving, I feel, has been one of the most beautiful aspects of my life and, at the same time, has brought me to my knees. It shows you parts of yourself that force you to realize just how vulnerable you are (and simply human). As much as I wish I were Superwoman, I am not. There have to be points where I say no or ask for help because it is not mine to carry alone. Yet, it is really, really hard.

Caregiving brings so much love, and what a gift that is. And at the same time, that love, if not kept in check, can make you feel fearful, even anxiety-ridden. It can consume you in ways you don't always realize and, over time, can lead to depression and a feeling of losing yourself.

This is one of the reasons I write. It helps remind me that I am not alone. I know I am not the only one struggling with this, and in a way, it brings me great comfort to know that I am not unique in this kind of suffering, even when it can feel like I am.

It feels shameful to admit this out loud because as parents, we are supposed to simply give. But left unchecked, that constant giving can and will lead to mental health challenges because no person can keep up with only giving. You also deserve to receive.

I don’t really have a neat ending for this. I am too sleep deprived for that. Maybe I am still somewhere in the middle of figuring out how to be here, how to care for someone else without losing myself, and how to let myself be cared for too.

For now, I think it is enough to say that this is where I am. I don’t have some profound ending or lesson to offer because, honestly, I’m still very much in the trenches. Maybe that is the point. Sometimes all we can do is tell the truth about where we are and trust that someone else might recognize themselves in it. And maybe that is enough. Sometimes it is just important to start somewhere.

Last summer, I was around 32 weeks pregnant. I remember feeling grateful that I still had the energy to facilitate a retreat, while also knowing that something was changing. I knew it wouldn’t be the same again. And that didn’t need to mean something was wrong. Things were going to change in my life, and that included how I would hold space for others—and how I would hold space for myself.

This summer, I was able to facilitate the retreat with my son.

I hadn’t planned for it to be that way, but I felt deeply grateful that I could bring him and share with him an experience that has been so meaningful to me for so many years. The retreat also came at a tender time. This summer has felt particularly close to grief as I marked ten years since Jake’s passing.

One of the things I shared at the retreat was that summer doesn’t have to feel full of joy and adventure.

Grief is allowed to be here, too.

It doesn’t mean anything is wrong.

There seems to be a particular stigma around feeling sad in the summer, when everything around us is supposed to be bursting with excitement. There is warmth, longer days, vacations, gatherings, movement, and the sense that we should be making the most of it all.

But every summer is different.

And just because it is warm outside doesn’t mean it will always feel warm inside of us.

I’m grateful that I have developed such a patient relationship with my grief. I don’t experience it as something that is holding me back—a phrase I often hear when people talk about grief. Instead, I experience it as a tender reminder that I am capable of feeling deeply.

I have always felt this way about myself.

When I was little, I often thought something was wrong with me. I didn’t understand why I experienced things with such intensity or why I couldn’t simply play and feel like a child. I know there were moments when I did. But when I look back, I remember carrying some very big feelings and not knowing what to do with them.

Now, in my late thirties, I look back at that little girl and want to tell her:

Nothing is wrong with you.

You are allowed to feel.

You are lucky to have such big feelings.

I think this is part of what grief has taught me.

By allowing myself to feel my grief, I feel that I open myself more fully to life. I don’t necessarily fear grief as much as I once did. Instead, I want to experience more of what it means to be alive—and I know that means making room for all of it.

Summer has always been a season that brings me back into my senses and into my experience of being alive. And throughout the retreat, I got to be present not only with the students and with myself, but also with my son.

I got to witness him encountering something new and also feel all of his feelings around it too.

He learned a few yoga shapes that he now loves exploring at home. Watching him find his own delight in something that has been so meaningful to me felt like such a gift. And yet, he also cried through some of the new experiences because they were unfamiliar and, at times, simply too much stimulation for him. That was okay, too.

This is what I had hoped for in having a child—not a child who would be molded into the things I love, but a child who could encounter the world alongside me and discover his own joy within it, while also having the freedom to feel whatever else comes with being in the world.

There is something about watching him experience the world that reminds me that life is not meant to be controlled or perfectly curated. We meet what is here. We experience it. We find our way through.

And sometimes what is here is joy.

Sometimes it is grief.

Often, it is both.

I shared at the retreat that, as a therapist, I notice how often therapy can become centered around coping.

And there is absolutely value in that. We need coping skills. We need self-regulation. We need ways to move through difficult moments when our systems are overwhelmed.

But sometimes I wonder if we can become so focused on coping that we miss the heart of a person. There is a difference between learning how to tolerate discomfort and learning how to actually be with our lives.

Not everything has to feel good.

And I think that is something we are increasingly accustomed to seeking. We want to feel better, regulate ourselves, move through the difficult thing, get back to normal.

But what if grief isn’t something we need to get through? What if sometimes it is something we are invited to feel?

It can feel frightening to let grief have a place in a season that is supposed to be joyful. We might worry that if we let it in, it will take up too much space. But I have found the opposite to be true. When I make space for grief, it gives me space back.

I can feel the ache of what I have lost and still laugh with my son.

I can miss someone deeply and still feel the warmth of the sun on my skin.

I can carry ten years of grief and still be surprised by the beauty of a new moment.

Maybe this is what summer continues to teach me: that we don’t have to choose between joy and grief.

We can let them sit beside each other.

We can allow the warmth outside of us to coexist with whatever season is happening inside.

And perhaps, when we stop asking ourselves to feel only what we think we should feel, we become even more available to the life that is actually here.

Maybe this is what summer continues to teach me: that we don’t have to choose between joy and grief. We can let them sit beside each other.

We can laugh with our children while carrying the people we miss. We can feel overwhelmed by something new and still find our way toward delight. We can let the hard things be hard without believing they have taken something away from us.

There is room for all of it.

And perhaps this is what it means to be more fully alive—not to spend our lives trying to feel better, but to become more willing to feel what is here.

The grief.

The joy.

The tenderness.

The discomfort.

The warmth of the sun on our skin.

All of it belongs

.

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As I often say with grief, I don’t think it gets easier as the years go by—you simply learn how to live alongside it. You become more familiar with the absence, more accepting of what happened, but that doesn’t mean the loss disappears. It took me years to arrive at that place of acceptance, and even now, there are moments when the weight of it returns.

Over the years, I have tried to make this week something that feels like an authentic remembrance. A time to honor what was, what was lost, and what still remains. Often, I have taken a trip during this week. Many of those journeys were ones I took alone because I needed the space to move through my grief privately—to feel the depth of the love and the loss without needing anyone else to understand it.

But this year feels different.

Now I have a little family of my own. A family that doesn’t need to carry my grief for me, but instead can witness me within it. I don’t have to hold these memories alone. I am allowed to be seen in my grief—even 10 years later.

Even after finding another deep and loving partnership. Even after becoming a mother to a son who has brought a kind of love and joy I never could have imagined. The presence of new love does not erase the love that came before. It does not replace what was lost. Instead, it expands the capacity of my heart to hold all that has been, all that is, and all that continues to unfold.

This week, I remember Jake. I remember the life we shared, the love we created, and the person I was because of knowing him. And I also honor the life that has grown around that loss—the love that found me again, the family I have built, and the many ways grief and gratitude can exist together.

There were days, weeks, and even years when I truly did not know if I would make it out of the depths of my grief. I could not imagine a future beyond the pain I was carrying. And yet, slowly, quietly, one breath at a time, life continued to unfold. I continued to heal even when I didn’t know where I was going or who I would be become. It continued to teach me to become someone who could carry both the love and the loss.

This year, with my partner and son beside me to witness me through this week, I find myself wondering what it would feel like to sit across from Jake now, 10 years later, and tell him about this life—the home I've created, the son I'm raising with a partner I feel deeply connected to, and the person I have become.

I imagine the things he would laugh at, the questions he would ask, and the ways he would remind me not to take any of it too seriously. I wonder what he would think of the life that has unfolded, of the ways I have grown, and of all the unexpected places this journey has taken me.

I wish I could have one more conversation with him. And at the same time, I feel so deeply fulfilled by the time we shared. It wasn’t enough, and somehow, it was enough all at once.

Jake came into my life at exactly the time I needed him. Loving him—and losing him—set me on a journey that awakened my heart in ways I don’t think anything else could have. His life, and his death, changed me forever.

I will never be the same person because of him, and I am deeply grateful for that. I move through the world with a greater capacity to love, to be present, and to hold both joy and sorrow together. I no longer fear the end of life in the way I once did. That doesn’t mean fear never arises, but I know, in the deepest part of myself, that peace is possible. I witnessed it with Jake, and that experience continues to shape how I live today.

Ten years later, I don’t carry Jake as someone I am trying to hold on to. I carry him because he is woven into who I am. Into the way I love, the way I grieve, the way I mother, the way I meet suffering, and the way I find beauty in ordinary moments.

His life became part of my life. His death became part of my story. And both continue to shape the person I am still becoming.

Love doesn't end. It changes form. And what a gift it is to have known a love that continues to expand my heart. Even after all these years, he remains deeply present—not in the way he once was, but woven into who I am and the life I continue to live.

So this week, I’ll take another trip.

I’ll remember. I’ll cry when the tears come. I’ll laugh at the memories that still make me smile. I’ll hold gratitude for the years we were given and tenderness for the years we weren’t.

And then I’ll return home—to the life that grief made possible, to the little family that now walks beside me, and to the love that continues to surround me in ways I never could have imagined.

Carrying Jake with me 10 years later, I am reminded that love is never truly lost. It changes shape. It settles into the parts of us that have been forever changed by knowing someone. And somehow, it continues to ask us to keep opening our hearts to all that is still here.

When physical pain arises in my body, I’ve started to experience it less as something to fix and more as a message. An invitation to return to myself, to my inner world, and to acknowledge what is living inside me. What asks not to be solved, but witnessed. What needs my attention in order to truly heal.

I have parts of myself that want to avoid pain at all costs. They become busy, distracted, productive, convinced that if I just do more, somehow I’ll become more. They work tirelessly to protect me from what feels too overwhelming to face.

But my deepest breakthroughs have never come from outrunning pain. They come when I allow myself to enter it—to let it be messy, raw, and imperfect. To witness it without needing to change it.

As I allow myself to feel what is actually here instead of judging myself for it, something shifts. Many days it’s still difficult to access joy or rest. My nervous system often feels caught in a state of fight or flight. Recently, some physical pain resurfaced and reminded me that caring for myself isn’t always about doing more.

Sometimes it’s about becoming quiet enough to feel what I’ve been carrying.

Each time I do, I find myself returning home.

Motherhood has become an unexpected companion on my healing journey. It has invited me into a kind of rawness I haven’t experienced since walking alongside Jake during his dying process. While the circumstances are profoundly different, both experiences have asked me to stay present with what I cannot control. Both have invited grief—not only for death, but for the many lives we imagined and the many versions of ourselves we leave behind.

We grieve in both life and death. I believe grief is one of the most universal parts of being human.

The more I allow myself to be with the pain that is here—to acknowledge my grief and accept my life as it is rather than cling to the illusion of what I thought it would be—the more I discover a quiet kind of peace.

I don’t have to solve it.

I don’t have to make it go away.

I simply get to let it unfold.

Of course, there are still parts of me that long for control, believing that if they can just figure everything out, I’ll finally feel “okay”. But I’ve learned that this striving often creates more distance from myself, not less.

Thích Nhất Hạnh once wrote, “What we need to hear is the sound of the Earth crying.”

When I heard those words during a recent walking meditation, I stopped. Tears rolled down my face. Something in me softened because I knew exactly what he meant. I felt it.

So often, when we experience pain, we believe it is happening to us. We wonder what we did to deserve it, or we begin to see ourselves as victims of it. Either way, we can end up feeling powerless in its presence.

But when I look to nature, I see something different.

The earth is constantly changing. Trees lose their leaves. Flowers wither. Forests burn. Rivers carve new paths. Things die to make room for new growth. There is loss woven into every season, yet nature doesn’t resist its unfolding. It simply continues becoming.

When these same cycles show up in our own lives, they often feel like betrayal. We grieve the future we imagined. We struggle to accept the one that is here.

And yet, perhaps this, too, is part of being alive.

Perhaps healing begins by listening to the quiet cries within ourselves instead of turning away from them.

Because when we allow ourselves to feel the grief beneath our own feet, we may discover that pain isn’t pulling us away from ourselves.

It’s leading us home.

Perhaps we are not truly lost.

Perhaps we are afraid of what we already know.

I know it doesn’t feel that way. Sometimes it feels easier to believe we’re lost than to turn toward the truth quietly waiting within us. To feel what is here without needing to understand it. Without rushing to fix it. Without asking it to move faster than it’s ready to.

The storyteller inside us longs for certainty. It weaves explanations, searches for answers, and tries to protect us from what we feel. Those parts are doing what they’ve always known how to do. They are trying to keep us safe.

But healing rarely asks us to know more.

More often, it asks us to stay.

Even when it feels dark, there is still light. Sometimes we’ve been looking down for so long that we’ve forgotten to look up.

The path home may not be the one you expected. It may ask you to grieve what was, release the map you thought you needed, and trust a road you’ve never walked before.

But every honest step toward yourself is a step toward home. And perhaps that is what pain has been trying to show us all along.

It’s funny how often we think we can predict how we’re going to feel—especially when it comes to grief. For me, I can see a protective part step in, trying to shield me from being crushed by the weight of it all. Then the anxiety arrives in waves, convincing me I need to prepare for something I can’t quite name.

Over time, though, I’ve stopped trying to get ahead of grief. I’ve learned that what helps most is creating space to be with my experience as it unfolds. When I stop judging what I’m feeling and allow myself to be present with my body and mind, the waves begin to settle. Not because the grief disappears, but because I’m no longer fighting it.

As Memorial Day comes and goes, so do the memories I continue to carry in my heart—memories of Jake, and of the meaning both his life and death have come to hold for me. What I’ve noticed is that, as the years pass, I spend less time trying to move through my grief and more time allowing it to move through me. There is less urgency now. Less pressure to find closure or make sense of it all. Instead, there is a willingness to sit with whatever arises, for however long it needs to be there.

This Memorial Day, I found myself thinking about Jake’s life and the path that led him to the Army—thinking more about his experience.

Jake joined the Army shortly after high school as a way to anchor himself and build a life that felt meaningful and purposeful. As I came to know him and learn more about his childhood, it made sense that the military would become a kind of refuge. He wanted to become a better version of himself, and the military offered him a path, a structure, and mentors who could help shape him into someone he felt proud of becoming.

I’m not trying to romanticize military service. Rather, I’m sharing what Jake expressed to me about why he first chose to enlist and why he continued to volunteer for deployments throughout the Middle East. It wasn’t until he returned from his last tour that he was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury related to service exposure and hazardous conditions overseas.

Around that same time, a routine medical examination revealed tongue cancer. Within a few years, that diagnosis progressed into lung cancer. He endured chemotherapy and radiation before eventually losing his life to the illness.

It is difficult to capture in a single post what Memorial Day brings up for me.

The day is not about me, yet every year it carries a wave of emotions tied to the life I shared with Jake and the life we never got to live. This year would have marked our tenth anniversary. Sometimes I imagine what the last decade might have looked like—how we would have grown alongside one another, how our relationship would have deepened, and how love might have continued shaping both of us.

What I miss most is not just Jake himself, but the feeling of being known by him.

When we first met, I remember feeling seen on a level I had rarely experienced before. Before knowing him, I carried assumptions about Veterans—that many returned disconnected from their emotions or unable to express what they felt. Jake challenged those assumptions completely. From the outside, others may have perceived him that way, but the more I came to know him, the more I discovered a man who felt deeply and expressed those feelings in ways that were authentic to who he was.

Over the years, Memorial Day has become a reminder that grief is not something we move beyond. Instead, it becomes another way that love continues to live within us.

So when emotions surface around Jake, I am learning not to judge myself for still carrying them. I am learning to welcome the tenderness that appears on days like this—the ache, the longing, the gratitude, and the love. Because even now, years later, my grief remains inseparable from the depth of what he meant to me.

The more I heal and integrate my grief, the more I feel like myself—which, in turn, gives me the confidence to live authentically rather than as a version of myself shaped by a story I’ve been telling. It has taken years of inner work, reflection, and learning how to be present with my life as it is.

What has stayed with me most is remembering how unshaken Jake seemed by the future. Near the end of his life, he carried a kind of peace that I struggled to understand at the time. Looking back, I think it was because he allowed himself to be fully present. He didn’t need to fear the future or carry guilt about the past. He was rooted in the moment, living his life with the understanding that all any of us truly have are the days and weeks in front of us.

That realization has stayed with me. It struck me as both courageous and freeing—to live and to love without clinging so tightly. I don’t think I could have understood that lesson without first experiencing the depths of grief and allowing parts of who I was to fall away.

Over time, I stopped trying to force answers. Instead, I learned to follow the questions. What emerged was a deeper sense of curiosity, compassion, and openness toward life. More than anything else, that is what grief has ultimately changed in me.

Memorial Day continues to be a time when I pause, reflect, and remember. And often, the days and weeks that follow invite the same quiet contemplation. In that space, I feel more connected to my life as a whole—not grasping for what was or what could have been, but allowing myself to be present with the sacredness of what was. I return to the life I once shared with a man I will always carry in my heart, and to the memories that continue to shape me. Rather than pulling me away from life, those memories help me feel more deeply connected to it. They invite me into a quieter kind of presence—one where love, loss, gratitude, and memory can all belong.

Writing has always been a way for me to heal in my own language, in my own way. That’s what feels most important about it to me—that it is not born out of force, performance, or the desire to become a certain kind of voice. In fact, when I look back at my writing, it often feels more honest than what I would say in my daily, waking life. Writing has a way of bringing me back home to myself—not to the image of who I think I should be, but to the deeper truth of who I am beneath it all.

There is something about writing that asks me to stay. Even when I admit things that feel terrifying, vulnerable, or soaked in grief I would rather run from, I know I have to remain with my words a little longer. I have to hold them the same way I hold my baby when he wakes up screaming at 2 a.m. I do not force him back to sleep. I hold him. I rock him. I let him know I am here and that I will not go away until he feels safe again.

Sometimes I cry through the words I write, and the tears feel deeply genuine—like hearing unexpected news that touches a hidden part of your heart. And yet those tears also remind me how profoundly human I am. I know when I go through long periods without crying, I am only holding myself together for as long as I can before something eventually unravels.

I wish I didn’t need to cry in order to feel relief, but I do.

In the short term, crying sometimes makes me like myself a little less. It makes me feel childlike. And yet, it is through caring for myself as gently as I would care for a child that I most deeply honor who I am. I think one of the greatest lies we are told is that adulthood means we will always feel like adults. There is still an inner child living inside all of us.

The more I accept myself for who I truly am, instead of wishing I were someone else, the more peace I find. I am someone who feels and sees the world deeply. I am someone who experiences anxious and depressive thoughts that, when traced back to their roots, often lead me toward grief and trauma still lingering in both my body and mind.

And somehow, the more I feel, the more I heal.

It does not always feel that way in the moment, and that’s okay. But I know it is more important for me to be honest with myself than to hide behind the shadow of perfectionism. I wish this were not true. I wish I could simply choose differently. But here I am, writing in the middle of the night, realizing this may be the most honest I have been with myself in months.

It is in these late hours that I can touch my grief without trying to judge it or force it away. I sit. I listen. I feel how it moves through me as something almost physical, almost sensory. Grief changes form constantly. It finds new ways to express what still needs to be felt.

And when grief wakes me in the middle of the night, I no longer believe it is trying to hurt me. I think it is trying to tell me something important. Not to scare me, but to hold me closer to my own truth—in my tears, in the experiences that leave me shaken for days, months, or even years.

What a wild experience it is to be human—to encounter so much beauty and suffering, sometimes all at once.

I wrestle often with the meaning of it all, and then I remind myself that perhaps I am not here to solve the experience of being alive. How human of me to believe I might someday discover the answer. But the more I write, the more I realize I am not here to fully make sense of life, or even justify it. Writers try, of course. And while I may find comfort in their words, the writers who move me most are not trying to convince me to feel differently about life. They are inviting me into their experience of it—not as a puzzle to solve, but as a heart to sit beside, to feel with, and maybe even to heal through.

Sometimes I wish healing were prettier. I wish it did not involve such an intimate awareness of how impermanent life truly is. That realization alone feels like a lifetime of grief to carry.

And so here I am again—awake late at night, stirred by both a crying baby and a mind full of swirling thoughts and tears. Yet both seem to remind me of the same thing: it is okay to feel human.

There is nothing more precious than that.

It is not pretty or polished or perfectly pink. It is something much deeper. A strange and sacred connection to not knowing anything for certain while somehow feeling everything all at once. What a humbling experience that is.

I often like to leave my writing with something for both myself and the reader—not necessarily hope, though sometimes hope appears on its own, but rather a deeper permission to feel. Even when what surfaces is uncomfortable. Even when the truth feels too heavy to sit beside for long.

I know this kind of writing is not for everyone. And the more I share my inner world, the more I accept that truth. But I would rather be honest than become a version of a writer I think others would prefer.

These words are simply the truth of my lived experience.

And grief, whether I want it to or not, seems woven into every piece I write. I have tried to write without it present, and nothing comes. I enter a creative drought. Somehow, it is grief that brings life and color to my words.

In many ways, grief has become my companion late at night—the quiet voice reminding me it is okay to feel this deeply. Even when it makes no sense. Even when I feel grateful for my life and where I am and yet still sad at the same time.

It is still okay to cry. To cradle myself. To comfort the unknown parts of my heaviness instead of trying to fix them.

Because maybe this was never something meant to be fixed.

Maybe it was simply something meant to be witnessed with honesty, presence, and care.

The suffering comes when I resist the life I actually have—when I long for reality to become something different than what it is. But peace seems to arrive when I allow life to simply be what it has always been: an experience of being deeply human. Feeling. Loving. Losing. Holding beauty and grief in the same trembling hands.

And so tonight, I honor the grief that keeps me connected—to my words, to my creativity, to the deeper parts of myself I might otherwise abandon. I feel an intimacy now in staying with it instead of running away.

I take a deep breath. I place my hand over my heart. And somewhere beneath the heaviness, I know this too will move through me.

The feelings will rise and fall like tides, and perhaps what still aches within me only ever wanted this: to finally feel seen, known, and held in myself.

I see it as moving through grief in a different season of life. I have a child now, and while there is so much joy, yet there is also grief that remains unprocessed and the post partum experience truly shows you that. Pregnancy and birth truly do change you both on a mental and physical level.

It reminds me of my experience of marrying and then losing Jake. While postpartum refers to the period after childbirth, my post-loss and widowhood felt just as life changing. I had so much grief inside of me that needed tending, but I was also afraid. Afraid to fully feel my experience. Afraid to accept the loss of such a profound love in my life. Why would I want to convince myself he wasn’t alive?

But even beyond losing him, I grieved the life I thought I would have. The life we would have had together. Marriage, likely children, different career paths, living in new places, continuing to travel the world. I had it all mapped out—until I didn’t.

Postpartum depression feels, in many ways, like a similar unraveling. I had imagined how this chapter of my life would look and feel. And yet, here I am six months postpartum, and it still feels hard in ways I didn’t expect. I remember feeling something similar six months after losing Jake. I thought I would feel more like myself again, more like I was moving forward. Instead, I felt an even deeper sense of loss—because I carried the expectation that I should have figured it out by then.

The more I allow myself to feel what is actually here, rather than layering expectations on top of it or convincing myself I “should be grateful, should be more joyful” the more space I have to become curious about my grief.

I have experienced depression since I was young, but looking back, I see that it was grief that didn’t have a place to go. I didn’t have the tools or language for it. I just wanted to feel “normal” so I tried to push away and avoid my deeper, often sadder feelings. I often wondered if others felt to the same depth and sensitivity.

Moving through postpartum has, in some ways, been an illuminating experience. It has taken me back—to being younger, holding the heaviness of my thoughts and the intensity of my sensitivity without knowing what to do with either. It has also taken me back to my early grief after Jake’s passing, when I wasn’t sure I would ever truly recover.

I felt a deep void, unsure when—or if—it would ever lift. I remember wondering if loving him so deeply meant I would never experience love like that again. How could anything ever compare?

Over time, I’ve come to understand depression differently. To me, it has been a kind of protector—of both my heart and my mind. When it surfaces, I try to listen. It often feels like a signal that there is something here that needs to be held and witnessed, and that I don’t have to process it all at once. I think we often stigmatize depression and miss the ways it can be connected to grief. I haven’t met many people who have experienced depression without also knowing loss. Yet we tend to over-clinicalize it as a diagnosis, rather than recognizing it as a state of deep mourning.

And here is the thing—it’s also okay not to know exactly what you are grieving. It’s not always about figuring it out. Sometimes it’s about offering yourself compassion, trusting that something within you is asking for your attention.

The other day, I was on a walk, noticing the new blooms on the trees, when I realized it was this time of year that I first learned of Jake’s terminal diagnosis. And it hit me, no wonder these past few postpartum months feel especially tender. There are layers here that haven’t been fully integrated.

I don’t think grief ever leaves—it just changes form. And the more I accept that, the more I notice that when it comes, it brings me closer to myself… and, somehow, closer to feeling alive.

In postpartum, I think you become more attuned and sensitive to yourself in a way that feels both necessary and raw. You have to be—to care for a baby. You learn to listen closely, to subtle cues, to make meaning out of cries. And it brought me back to when Jake could no longer speak in his end of life journey. I had to trust that I knew how to care for him. I would lie next to him in his hospice bed, reminding him that I was still there—still loving him, still caring for him in the ways he needed.

I’m learning that grief doesn’t mean something is wrong. It means something mattered. It means something still lives within me.

And maybe postpartum isn’t just about caring for new life, but about learning how to hold all the life within us—past and present—with a little more gentleness. There are layers here—of love, of loss, of becoming—that don’t cancel each other out. They can coexist.

Healing isn’t about returning to who we once were, but learning how to live inside all of it. To carry both the grief and the joy. To let them shape us, soften us, and remind us that we are still here—still feeling, still becoming.

My postpartum journey is teaching me to stay—with the grief, the love, the parts of me that are still unfolding. To trust that something is shifting. Something is tending to me as much as I am learning to tend to it. And that it’s okay for this to take time to just be with it all.

I am not who I once was, and I don’t know exactly who I am becoming—but I trust that I am becoming someone who can hold both joy and sorrow more fully. Someone who can love again—not in the same way, but in a way that is just as real, just as deep. There is something sacred about being in the in-between, and I am allowing myself to be there—with the grief and tenderness that ask to be held with love and compassion, so that my grief can be honored rather than carried as a burden.

Maybe this is what healing asks of us—not to move on, but to move with. To carry what we’ve loved in a new way. To let it shape us without hardening us. To trust that something meaningful is still growing here, even in the unknown, even when it feels messy and heavy. It’s okay to be here and not know how to move through the grief.

Maybe the only place to begin is here: name what hurts. Sit with it, even briefly. And see what shifts when you meet yourself with compassion instead of urgency. Wherever you are in your own process, there is nothing wrong with you for feeling it this deeply. Grief is not something to solve—it’s something to tend to. And even here, something within you is still growing. I hope you remember that.

In our bodies, it marks a subtle but powerful shift—moving from yin, earth energy into yang, fire energy, yet not quite landing in either. There’s something about existing in that in-between space—an airy, liminal quality—that feels especially tender after emerging from the winter season.

I feel more raw and exposed as spring begins to bloom. I can’t hide in the same ways I could in winter, when turning inward felt necessary—when my process could remain unseen. Now, I find myself more visible, both to others and to myself, meeting who I am in this season with a different kind of honesty.

For me, spring can bring a lot of anxiety around what is changing. Even as I enjoy the flowers beginning to bloom and the longer, warmer days that invite evening walks, there is still grief present. The honest truth is now I find myself grieving the winter season. Winter, for me, is often a time of deep reflection and remembrance. It brings up memories and invites me to sit with the reality of how my life has unfolded in a way that feels honest.

I’ve always been a dreamer. I’ve always loved romanticizing the future and imagining what’s possible. It’s a quality I still deeply appreciate in myself. And yet, at times, I can get ahead of myself—dreaming of a life that was never meant to be mine, except in my mind.

Spring becomes a humbling reminder of the transitions I will continue to face. It brings me back to the realities that are always present—realities I can only avoid, numb, or escape for so long if I am unwilling to accept what is true. At the end of the day, these realities are the truth of my life, whether parts of me accept them or not.

The grief I continue to face lives in that tension—in not fully accepting that I have changed, that my life is different. The life I once imagined for myself at 36 is not the life I have today. And yet, there is nothing wrong with my life. The grief comes from learning how to hold both: the life I once had, the memories that shaped me, and the life I am living now.

Grief does not have to hold me back. It can be something I carry with me—something that allows me to honor where I’ve been while still making space to be present with what is.

In many ways, spring brings up more grief for me than winter. It asks me to truly let go so that I can make space for what is meant to come in. I think of it like planting seeds that may or may not turn into flowers. I can hope for blooms, but I cannot force them. Growth depends on the right conditions—the quality of the soil, the temperature of the environment, the amount of water. And it requires patience.

As humans, we tend to resist waiting. Waiting asks us to sit in the unknown, which can feel like a loss of control. And in many ways, it is. We are never truly in control—we are often holding onto an illusion of it.

This is a truth I find myself returning to again and again. Spring is my teacher in this. While there are beautiful moments, there are also harsh ones—moments that ask me to keep tending to the soil even when I don’t see any visible growth.

So often, we give up when we don’t see immediate results. But real change—especially the kind that happens within us—takes time. It cannot be forced. The more we try to rush our transformation, the longer we may find ourselves stuck within it. But when we slow down, when we soften and open to what is here, we allow ourselves to integrate the change rather than struggle against it.

If you find yourself in a season like this too—somewhere in between, holding both hope and grief—I hope you can be gentle with yourself. There is nothing wrong with growing slowly. Some seasons ask even more of us: more kindness, more compassion, more care than we think we should need.

We may want to rush out of our suffering, to move quickly toward something lighter. But sometimes, it is the acceptance of what is that allows us to move through it at all.

And if you don’t feel joyful right now, if part of you longs for this season of transition to be over—that’s okay too.

So I’ll leave you with this: what is one small way you can show up for yourself with a little more courage, a little more tenderness, as you move through this season?

When I found out, I felt something in my body collapse in a familiar way. Not the sharp, disorienting shock of sudden loss—but something slower, heavier. A grief that already knows the shape of itself.

We talked on the phone about her experience, and she shared that she had been working with a therapist who specializes in young adults and families facing cancer. She told me something that has stayed with me:

When young adults are nearing the end of their lives, they often make plans.

Not just small plans—but intentional, thoughtful ones about their death. I smiled when she said that, because that deeply resonated with me. Jake did just this. In this moment it didn’t make sense to me, but he planned his entire funeral so that I wouldn’t have to. Every detail was decided. He even wrestled with whether he wanted to be cremated or buried—and chose a coffin just in case. Everything was not only planned, but paid for.

When we talked about it, I struggled to understand why it mattered so much to him. Those conversations devastated me. But for him, they weren’t about loss—they were about peace. About creating a sense of closure in the face of what was coming.

He knew what he wanted. He wanted a celebration. He wanted his people to come together without the weight of decision-making or guilt. He didn’t want anyone wondering if they had done it “right.” And when the time came, it was exactly that. It was everything Jake wanted.

When I heard that my friend’s brother had passed, I burst into tears.

Not just for her. Not just for him, but also for Jake and the young adults that are faced with stage 4 cancer. For that same confrontation with life that death seems to force upon us. Because when a young person dies, it feels unnatural. It feels wrong. It feels unfair in a way that doesn’t quite resolve.

And yet—both Jake and my friend’s brother shared something striking. They were optimistic about their life and death. Not in a way that denied reality. Not in a way that pretended they weren’t dying. But in a way that chose life anyway.

They took trips.
They did what mattered to them.
They lived, fully aware of the ending.

There is something profoundly honest about that kind of living.

It’s a reminder I didn’t ask for—but one I can’t ignore: We don’t have to wait for a terminal diagnosis to start living our lives. We don’t have to wait until the end to ask ourselves what matters. We don’t have to wait until everything is stripped away to choose presence, connection, or meaning.

On the phone, I told my friend that both her brother’s death and Jake’s have been stirring something in me lately. A desire—not just to live—but to come to peace with my life. Now. Not someday. Not at the end. But here, in the middle of it.

Because if death is inevitable, maybe peace doesn’t have to be postponed.

I wonder sometimes if this is part of getting older. That what we begin to want shifts. Less about material things. Less about achievement or accumulation. And more about something quieter, deeper—something soul-driven.

A desire to feel connected. To feel aligned. To feel like we are actually inside our lives, not just moving through them. Maybe we can design our lives in a way that brings us closer to that feeling.

Not perfectly. Not all at once. But intentionally. So that we are not living in quiet fear of death—but in relationship with life.

Before we hung up, my friend asked if I could recommend a training, a workshop, a retreat—something to help her move through her grief.

And I paused.

Because as much as I wanted to offer her something concrete, the truth felt more honest than any recommendation I could give. I told her to follow her intuition. To trust what she feels drawn toward. Because grief is not one-size-fits-all. It is not linear. And it is not something we can outsource.

We all need different things. We move through different stages. We find meaning in different places. For some, it might be religion. For others, cultural traditions. Rituals. Practices. Community. Solitude.

There is no right way—only the way that brings you closer to feeling less alone.

Maybe that’s what we’re all trying to do in the end. To feel less alone in this life. To feel like we lived it—fully, honestly, and in a way that mattered to us. Jake did that. So did my friend’s brother. And maybe the quiet invitation they leave behind for the rest of us is this:

Don’t wait.
Not for permission.
Not for the perfect moment.
Not for the end.

Seek the kind of peace that brings you fully alive now—because that peace is what will carry you when everything else falls away.

I don’t share this to make you sad, but to remind you: we are not separate from death. We are moving with it, always. And the more I allow myself to face that, the more I feel my grip begin to loosen.

On certainty.
On control.
On needing to understand it all.

I don’t believe peace comes from having answers.
I think it comes from surrender.

From trusting that this life—exactly as it is—is something we are meant to meet, not solve.

And maybe, in the end, it is not about being unafraid of death—
but about being so deeply rooted in our lives
that fear no longer gets the final say.

Grief is rarely just about what we have lost. Often, it is about the future we thought we were moving toward — the life we quietly built in our imagination that no longer exists.

We aren’t just grieving what we have lost in the present — we are also grieving the future we imagined for ourselves. I find this part of grief to be the hardest, and often why it takes me longer to move through it. What I once believed was my future no longer exists, and there is a deep acceptance required in realizing I must begin again in some way.

And yet, within that beginning again is the possibility of creating a new future — not one that is better, but one that feels more integrated with the life I am actually living, rather than the life I once imagined.

Grief is hard, especially when we are grieving what we do not know about the future. We cling to certainty because it helps us feel grounded, even though nothing in life is truly certain except death. I know this may not sound comforting, but remembering this often helps me soften toward my grief rather than experience it as additional suffering.

In Buddhist philosophy, as I have studied and practiced it in monasteries, there is an invitation: do not add more suffering onto your suffering. If suffering is already part of life, why compound it with resistance, projections, or stories about how things should have been?

I return often to this idea. If grief itself is suffering, I do not want to add more suffering on top of it — especially by holding tightly to a future that was never guaranteed in the first place.

And so, instead of adding more suffering by identifying solely with the loss of my imagined future, I try to turn toward the possibility of building a new one. Each time I do this, I find myself surprised by what my life becomes. It is not about things being better, but about feeling more connected to the life I am living now — experiencing more gratitude for where I have arrived than sorrow for what did not unfold.

And yet, grief does not disappear. We often carry the hope that if we grieve fully enough, one day there will be nothing left to mourn. That has not been my experience. Nearly ten years later, Jake still comes to mind with quiet regularity.

I don’t want his memory to fade. And alongside that longing, I hold deep gratitude for the life that has unfolded since. It brings me comfort to imagine that he would feel joy for me now. While I still wish he were here, my grief has softened with time — transforming into a felt sense of presence, something integrated into the fabric of my life rather than something I am trying to move beyond.

And so, if you find yourself in a season of grieving, I gently invite you to turn, even slightly, toward the possibilities that still exist within your future, rather than only the sadness it may carry. Being with sadness is necessary — we cannot outrun these emotions, nor should we try. But as Buddhist teachings remind us, we do not need to add suffering onto the suffering that is already here.

It takes courage to look toward the future again. To believe that something meaningful can still be created. That life is not only what has been lost, but also what continues to unfold.

May you allow your grief to be present, while leaving space for something new to emerge in its own time. And slowly, almost without noticing, life begins to open again — inviting us forward into possibility.

It hasn’t felt instinctual or effortless. It’s been something I’ve grown into. Skills I’ve developed over time. A capacity I’ve built — not a role that came “naturally,” the way people some people I have heard describe it.

And yet, caregiving is what has opened and expanded my heart more than anything else.

I’m someone whose life has been shaped by unexpected experiences, and I’ve done my best to make meaning from them rather than fall into hopelessness. But I’m still human. There are days when I wonder whether I can fully feel and hold my own life — both the present and the past — while carrying so much responsibility.

There are days when I wonder whether I can fully feel and hold my own life — both the present and the past — while carrying so much responsibility. And that tension is where so much of my growth has lived.

This is simply my personal experience — I don’t want to generalize motherhood or caregiving.

I’ve always been deeply empathetic, able to feel my own emotions and the emotions of others in a profound way. In many ways, that made me well-suited to be a caretaker. And yet, I’ve had to intentionally develop the skills to care for myself within it all.

I’ve had to intentionally develop the skills to care for myself within it all — to make sure I don’t disappear inside the caring. Now I’m in a season of life where I feel a strong pull to care for myself, too — not instead of caring for others, but alongside it.

I know I’m late to this realization. It’s really only been in the last few years that I’ve begun to understand how much I’ve neglected myself in the process of showing up for everyone else.

And yet, I don’t really believe in balance. I’m not sure we ever truly “arrive” at balance in life. Instead, I think it’s more about asking: what is the priority today? This week? This year? And how do those priorities receive more of your time and energy — knowing it won’t be perfect?

There will be days and weeks when things feel off. But maybe it’s less about getting it right and more about the intention to return.

It feels similar to meditation. Meditation isn’t about not having thoughts; it’s about coming back to your breath. It’s about anchoring yourself in the present moment, again and again.

That is the practice.

Not perfection — but remembering you have the capacity to return. To come back to yourself. To the present. To your humanity.

A reminder that you are human, not a machine.

And this is a skill — one you have to keep practicing and developing. For me, it’s been over 15 years of practice, and I still very much feel like a beginner.

But without that practice, I don’t think I could be the kind of caretaker I am. Not because I’m perfect at it, but because on the days I feel overwhelmed — when I hit lower points — I know it’s temporary. I come back to the knowing that if there is one thing that is certain, it’s that everything is changing. All the time. In every moment.

If change is the only constant, then this, too, will pass.

And I don’t have to cling to the suffering I might feel right now. I can let it move through. I can trust that it will shift.

Yet some days I still question myself. Some days I feel stretched thin.

But I’m learning that being a “good mother” — and a good caretaker — isn’t about never struggling. It’s about staying present enough to keep coming back. To trusting that everything will be okay, even when it doesn’t feel like it.

It’s a return to my inner resilience — remembering that it hasn’t left me. It’s simply waiting for me to come back home to myself.

My heart is my refuge. And at the end of the day, that’s what allows me to be the kind of mother, caretaker, partner, therapist and human I want to be.

If you’re in a season of caregiving and wondering if you’re doing enough — maybe the practice isn’t about doing more. Maybe it’s about remembering that you’re allowed to be human inside of it.

And maybe that’s the practice of coming home. Returning to who you are, again and again.

“Beautiful, just beautiful.” I can still hear Jake’s voice as I drove into Colorado in the summer of 2018, the landscape opening wide in front of me. At the time, I didn’t yet know how much this place would ask of me—or how much grief would teach me about staying.

I knew this place would be my home for the next few years as I completed graduate school. I had spent the years before traveling around the world, and during that time away I decided to apply to graduate school—wanting to root myself in a community again, to deepen my clinical skills, and to create a path toward a new career that inspired me.

I knew Colorado would be home because it was meant to be home for both of us. Our plan had been to move to northern Fort Collins once Jake’s chemotherapy was over. It took time to figure out whether I was ready to call northern Colorado home on my own, or whether I needed somewhere entirely new to begin again. I applied to graduate programs in multiple states, was accepted to all of them, and suddenly had to decide what home meant to me now. And still, I chose Fort Collins—where we had once imagined building a life, and where I am still living eight years later.

Grief has asked me to practice surrender again and again—in so many different places, spaces and seasons of my life. Surrender to what cannot be changed. Surrender to the truth that while I could not choose what happened, I could choose how I would live afterward. That choice did not come easily. I carried survivor’s guilt for a long time—heavy, quiet, persistent. I was still here. Still breathing. And I felt a deep responsibility to live fully, not only in honor of Jake’s memory, but beyond it.

I did not want to be known only as a widow, or as a surviving spouse. I wanted to become someone whole again—someone others might one day look to with hope. But before that, I had to learn how to aspire to a new version of myself not just on my own but also in community again. One who could hold the past with tenderness while still making room for a future. A future shaped differently than I once imagined, but meaningful nonetheless.

Letting go, I have learned, is not a singular act. It is a daily practice. Yoga has been my teacher here. Every time I step onto my mat, I am different—my body, my breath, my heart. Nothing stays the same. And in this repetition of showing up and releasing, I am reminded of my own humanity.

Grief still finds me most days. I no longer turn away from it. Instead, I sit beside it. I let the discomfort move through me. Letting go, for me, has become an act of acceptance—of seeing life exactly as it is, rather than how I once believed it should be. It is the quiet decision to release the imagined version of my life and allow the real one to unfold.

Recently, I had to fill out paperwork that required Jake’s information. Even now, nearly ten years later, I had to reach for his Social Security number. I hesitated over his birth year. Was it 1982? 1984? In those moments, I pause and breathe—judging myself for forgetting, while also fearing that forgetting means losing a part of myself. And then, when I remember, it feels as though he is still here. And somehow, that can ache just as deeply.

And then I shared in a recent job interview that I am a surviving spouse. Sometimes those words still land heavily in my body. Almost ten years have passed. I have a child now. I have built a life that once felt impossible to imagine. And still, I carry the quiet knowing of another life that could have been. I don’t know if that longing ever fully disappears. I am learning that it can exist alongside joy—and that both can be held at once.

If you are carrying your own version of grief—visible or quiet—I hope you know there is no timeline you need to follow. Letting go does not mean leaving anything behind. It means learning how to live honestly with what remains. We are allowed to be shaped by loss and still move forward, one breath at a time.

I am learning that grief does not ask to be solved. It asks to be carried—with patience, with honesty, with breath. Some days I carry it more easily than others. Some days it feels heavier than expected. And still, I keep living. I keep choosing presence over avoidance, tenderness over certainty. This life is not the one I imagined—but it is the one I am here for.

And that’s okay. It isn’t perfect, but I feel human. Even amid the collective grief unfolding in our world, I allow myself to feel into the heartache rather than distance myself from it. I know what it is like to avoid—to turn away in ways that only create more suffering. Choosing instead to lean into what is here, right in front of us, requires courage and commitment. It asks us to acknowledge the fragility of life—and to stay present anyway.

Grief and joy now live side by side in me. Neither cancels the other. This is not closure. This is continuation.

If you are still here—still breathing, still choosing, still showing up—I see you. There is no right way to carry what you’ve lost. There is only the practice of staying with your life as it is.

A slow life isn’t necessarily a present one. A present life can be slow, but it doesn’t have to be.

As a mother now, choosing to stay home doesn’t feel slow to me at all. Honestly, three months in, I thought I’d be baking sourdough and making hearty meals for myself and my partner. Instead, most days I’m just tired. If I manage breakfast, it’s a win. Usually coffee is the priority. There are moments when I genuinely wonder why women choose to stay home—because this doesn’t feel like slowing down. It feels like moving quickly through my days, trying to make it to the end in hopes of getting enough sleep to do it all again tomorrow.

For me, this season hasn’t been about slowing down in the way I imagined. It’s been about allowing myself to be present—even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. Presence still makes room for sweetness, for brief moments of joy.

Being Jake’s caregiver in his final months wasn’t slow either. He wanted to make the most of the time he had left, which meant being in the car a lot, seeing the people and places that mattered most to him, and creating what would become our final memories together.

I think about the trip we took to Montana to visit my sister and her now-husband. Jake wasn’t feeling well physically, though I didn’t yet understand the full extent of what his body was carrying. He knew how important it was to me to see my sister, and he wanted to go anyway. At the time, she was living in Great Falls—just a few hours from Glacier National Park—so of course we went.

The drive was mostly beautiful. My sister’s boyfriend (now husband) was planning to propose—something he’d shared with us the night before. We kept stopping in these stunning places, waiting for the moment, ready to capture it on our phones. There was no slowing down. There was only a deep commitment to presence—even for Jake, who was already living inside the discomfort of a body beginning to fail. And yet, he was still able to be present with it all.

That’s the life I’m choosing now. Not slow, but present.

And I feel relieved saying that. I don’t have to convince myself that things will get better once I slow down—because I’m not going to slow down. I want to keep building a future for myself and for my little family, while also learning how to be more present in the life I’m already living. In many ways, it feels similar to how I showed up with Jake during his final days: grounded in what was real, attentive, here—while still allowing my future to take up space.

That kind of presence is humbling. It requires me to pause—not to stop, but to interrupt the spiral of anxious thoughts when they start to take over. To take a deep breath, and then keep moving. That’s where I thrive.

I’ve never been a big city girl, but I’ve never been a country girl either. I’ve always lived somewhere in between—where I can have the energy and momentum of city life, and also the quiet of being at home more often, sometimes not seeing anyone for days besides my partner. I can hold both. One isn’t better than the other. And both can invite presence.

Maybe the question isn’t how slow we go, but how awake we are—how alive we feel in our daily lives, how present we can be even as life keeps moving.

I know not everyone gets to choose their pace. Many of us don’t have the privilege to stop working, move to the country side (or another “slower” country) or even radically simplify our lives. And still—presence is possible. Even in busy lives. Even on ordinary days. Even in the middle of it all. Not just on the weekends.

These days, this is what I’m offering my child and myself—not slowness, but intentional attention. Even in my sleep-deprived state, presence is still available to me. Slowness doesn’t serve me in this season, and yet gratitude keeps showing me the beautiful life I’ve built and allows me to feel the depth and width of the emotions that come with it. That’s what I always hoped for.

So I’m not waiting to slow down. I’m choosing to stay awake to my life as it is—moving, imperfect, and deeply alive.

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When I look back, I don’t have as many photos as I wish I did. But more importantly, what mattered most to me then was being with him. Being present. Those are the memories I hold—the moments of tenderness and vulnerability between us that can’t be captured in a photo.

The pressure to make every moment count—to turn each one into something meaningful—can actually pull us away from being human.

As I approach three months with my son, I notice a similar feeling. I don’t think I’ve taken enough photos, and yet I feel more present with him than I ever imagined. Not because every moment needs to count, but because I need to be there for him in each moment as it is.

And the truth is, I am deeply sleep-deprived. Most days, I’m lucky if I wash my face, spray it with hydrating rose water, brush my hair, and put on clothes that fit. My biggest task is to feed him, clothe him, bathe him—essentially, to keep him alive. With Jake, I was doing the same thing.

There are also moments when I don’t want to be fully present. It feels too hard. Sometimes I don’t want a certain memory to be created at all. And there are days when I forget how quickly my son is changing, when it feels like he looks the same today as he did yesterday.

What I’m saying is this: we don’t need to make every moment count. I don’t need to turn every sound my son makes into a poem. Just as I didn’t need to preserve every story Jake shared with me about his time in the military. I could simply listen. I could be with them as they were, without stretching or memorializing the moment.

As a writer, this can be challenging. I want to capture what my heart feels in these moments. And if I’m honest, at the same time, I don’t have the energy to always feel creative or inspired. Even writing a Substack post takes an incredible amount of energy these days, and I feel the pressure to offer something deeply inspiring or meaningful.

With Jake, it took months after his passing before I could write about what I had lived through—and how it changed me. It’s hard to write when you are in the experience and yet there is a pressure to capture all the details and feelings that you can while you are in the experience.

When I look back on my writing about Jake, I sometimes wish I had been more detail-oriented in what I recorded. It’s been almost ten years now, and while that period of my life still feels so close, I know I’m forgetting things as the years pass.

And yet, at the end of the day, does it really matter? What hasn’t changed at all is the love I still carry in my heart for Jake, every day. And now, the love I carry daily for my son. That love is real and true—and it doesn’t need a photograph to justify its significance.

I now know this season isn’t about remembering everything. Some seasons are about feeling—or simply surviving the days—rather than holding a constant sense of gratitude or purpose. Maybe it’s about loving fully, even when we’re tired. About being human, not archival. And trusting that what matters most will stay.

The love I carry has taught me this: presence doesn’t need preservation. Love remembers what it needs to remember.

Maybe not every moment needs to be captured. Some are meant to be lived, and some are meant to soften quietly inside us over time. The words will come when they’re ready. They always do. For now, I’m here—loving, showing up, and letting that be sufficient.

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We tend to like resolutions because they give us a sense of control. We can start something, finish it, check it off a list. We can set a goal and feel accomplished when it’s completed. But beginning a new year with resolutions alone can be heavy—and often isolating. So many resolutions are about fixing or improving ourselves, rather than being with ourselves.

We rush toward big, sweeping changes instead of tending to the small, steady steps that actually create a meaningful life.

I’m not here to check off another goal.
I’m here to live deeply.
To feel deeply.

That’s why, as I move into 2026, I’m choosing intentions. Intentions are meant to move with me throughout the year. They aren’t one-time declarations; they are ongoing, responsive, and alive—shifting as life shifts, meeting whatever is here.

And this isn’t just for me, or about me. Intentions invite me into relationship with my community. They pull me into a deeper web of connection, rather than into comparison or competition through resolutions.

I remember stepping into 2016 quietly. Jake hadn’t yet received his terminal cancer diagnosis, but after everything we had moved through in our relationship, something in me had already slowed. I was entering the new year more grounded, more present in my own life than I had been before.

I still carried hopes and things I wanted to work toward, but they no longer felt urgent. I wasn’t trying to race toward the next accomplishment or measure my worth by what I could check off. Time felt less like something to manage and more like something to be lived.

I had found the person I wanted to savor life with, and that changed the shape of everything. My attention shifted—from striving on my own to being in relationship, from doing to choosing.

It was no longer just about me, moving forward alone. It became about me with another person, learning how to walk through life together, slowly, intentionally, and with care.

As I enter 2026, ten years later, I feel that same familiar slowing. It’s strange how quickly time moves, and how, if we’re paying attention, it can also return us to a feeling we’ve known before.

This year, my intentions are rooted in simplicity and presence—gently coming back to what is here. With a newborn, each moment feels fleeting, already passing even as it arrives. That tenderness is familiar to me. It echoes the days and months I spent with Jake, when I knew each moment was something I would never get back.

In a quiet way, I’m grateful for having lived through that season, painful as it was. It taught me something I still carry: that life isn’t meant to be rushed through or stockpiled for later. It is lived—and felt—in the present.

As we step into the new year, I invite you to consider an intention—one that feels spacious rather than demanding. What might you want to expand into, or gently grow toward? What quiet desire has your heart been holding, waiting for the “right” time?

What could this year look like if you allowed yourself to be more, rather than do more? What might slowing down make possible? What does joy feel like in your body, in your ordinary days?

You don’t have to wait for permission or a perfect moment. Life doesn’t begin later. It is already here, ready to be met.

Perhaps this year isn’t about becoming someone new, but about returning—to yourself, to what matters, to the life already unfolding in front of you.

May this year offer you moments of presence, softness, and connection. May you let life meet you right where you are.

Caregiving has been one of the most meaningful parts of my life, and yet it’s the part that receives the least recognition or reward.

Caregiving is a full-time job, no matter what form it takes. And for many of us, it exists on top of the job we actually get paid for. But the fact that caregiving isn’t compensated doesn’t make it any less valuable. If anything, it reveals how limited our systems are — systems that only acknowledge labor when it produces a quantifiable product or an hourly wage.

If you are a caregiver, I want you to know: I see you. I see the tears, the exhaustion, the fierce love you carry, and the guilt that somehow shows up right alongside it.

Caregiving has stretched my heart open in ways I never could have imagined, and it has also brought me to my knees in depths of depression I never expected. This is the part we don’t talk about enough — the complexity, the contradiction, the truth that caregiving can be both sacred and devastating at the same time. And it deserves to be acknowledged.

My time with Jake is something I will never forget. Memories still surface — some beautiful, some painfully hard — reminding me of what that chapter of my life held. It was only one chapter, but it was a defining one, shaping me into the person I am today. And yet nothing outward will ever show for it, except the memories I carry.

Now, even though I’m still early in my parenting journey, I’m feeling something similar. I’m mothering not for reward or for any expectation that the care I give now will return to me later. I do it from the heart. And while I wish caregivers were more widely acknowledged for the unpaid, devoted work they do, part of caregiving is accepting that you may never be recognized — and still choosing to show up with consistency, presence, and love.

I’m not saying it’s easy. There are days I want a “sick day,” or to be sitting on a beach in Hawai‘i with a mai tai in hand. And it’s okay to feel that way. Even when caregiving comes from the heart — and I also want to honor those who find themselves in caregiving roles they didn’t expect, or who feel complicated emotions about it; not everyone’s experience is the same, and that’s okay — it is still incredibly hard.

To anyone caring for another person, in any circumstance: I bow to you.

It’s not easy work and you have to recognize in yourself how much you are doing, even if no one else sees or notices it.

There is grief in caregiving that doesn’t always get named — grief for who you were before, for the parts of yourself that get set down quietly, for work that leaves no proof it ever happened. And there is also love. Deep, aching love. Both can exist at the same time, even when that feels confusing or uncomfortable.

Caregiving is not pure or simple or endlessly selfless. It can be chosen or unchosen, heart-led or obligation-bound. It can hold devotion and resentment, tenderness and a longing for escape, all in the same breath. None of this makes you a bad caregiver. It makes you human.

As the holidays approach, let yourself be human. Make room for the joy, the grief, and everything in between.

It’s hard to put the postpartum experience into words unless you’ve walked it yourself, and even then, every woman’s journey is its own—different, personal, and shaped by her story, her journey. This season of my life is stirring up so many memories of caregiving. Some fill me with deep gratitude; others rise in the quiet hours and stay with me long into the night.

I feel everything more deeply right now, in a way that makes me miss old parts of my life. It’s such a strange experience—to love the life you’re living and, at the same time, yearn for and grieve the life you left behind. Even the parts you wouldn’t expect to miss. Even the parts that feel odd to long for. And yet, they are meaningful.

As I move through this longing, I’m learning how to more fully integrate the life I’m living now—this life with a newborn and everything that comes with it. I’m realizing that I am both the same woman and a different one, and that both can be true. I don’t need to “find myself.” Instead, I’m being invited to embody who I am now, in all her forms.

There is both a fullness and an emptiness in all of this. I feel so full in my life, and yet there are places that feel empty—spaces I’m learning not to rush to fill, but to sit with. To let the discomfort of that emptiness be present without trying to fix it. I don’t have to push it away; I can invite it in.

These empty parts just need to be held. They might need to cry, to be witnessed, to be acknowledged for what they are: reflections of what once was. They aren’t bad or wrong. They’re simply feeling the tenderness of change, and that is such a vulnerable experience.

And maybe this is what postpartum really is—not a linear return to who we were, but a widening. A stretching of the heart into places we didn’t know existed. A learning to hold both the woman we were and the woman we are becoming, without demanding that one replace the other.

I’m learning that the emptiness doesn’t need to be feared. It’s a doorway. A pause. A place where something new is quietly forming, long before it has a name.

So for now, I’m letting myself be here—full and empty, grateful and grieving, tired and deeply alive. I’m letting all of it belong. Because this version of me deserves to be held with the same tenderness I offer my baby: gently, patiently, without rushing her into who she’s not yet ready to be.

I bow to the woman I once was, and I’m learning to embrace the woman I am becoming. She is not perfect, but she is deeply human. And I honor her sacred presence in this chapter of life—of caregiving, of care receiving, of slowly becoming again.

I felt something similar with Jake after we learned his diagnosis. The days shifted and felt different. Time took on a different texture. Every moment counted even more.

I remember how exhausted I was as a caregiver, and yet I also knew it was temporary. The newborn stage carries that same truth. This level of sleep deprivation won’t last forever, but when you’re in it, it feels permanent.

Caregiving in any form asks so much of you—physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. It pushes the limits of what you thought you could hold. Doubt creeps in, but there’s rarely time to cling to it; you keep moving because you have to. These chapters of my life have been the hardest, and still, what keeps emerging are the small, necessary moments of joy I have to seek out in order to feel human. It can’t be all despair. I wouldn’t survive it if it were.

So I look for joy in the ordinary.

Rocking my baby to sleep and knowing I’m offering him a safe, loving home. Sleeping beside Jake each night so he could feel my presence and comfort. Stepping outside, the world looks and feels different now. I notice more—the changing leaves, the cracks and bumps in the sidewalk as I push the stroller, the shade of the sky, the way the air settles on my skin and reminds me I’m human. Life has become a sensory, somatic experience.

And even after traveling around the world, I keep returning to the same truth: joy in the ordinary is the most humbling and grounding of all. I don’t have to go anywhere to find it. It’s here. It has always been here. I just have to stay open enough to notice it.

What I want to emphasize is that joy and grief can exist together. Joy doesn’t cancel grief; they live side by side. Some days they take turns. Some days they arrive at the same time.

The more I embody this truth, the more freedom I feel to both cry and laugh without guilt. I’m not seeking joy to cover up grief. In fact, I feel more whole—more integrated—when I allow myself to experience both at once.

What I’ve learned is that the more I can do this, the more at peace I feel. There is no right way to grieve, and there is no single way joy is supposed to look or feel. Both are deeply personal—an ongoing relationship we develop with the world and with ourselves.

Caregiving has taught me that life will always ask a lot of us. But it has also shown me that the quietest moments—the ones tucked between exhaustion and uncertainty—are often where joy slips in. And that joy, small as it is, is what carries me.

If you’re in a season like this too—where joy and grief blur at the edges—I hope you find something ordinary today that reminds you you’re still alive to it all.

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When Jake and I were together, we often talked about our future. We dreamed about more than just traveling the world together. We both came from big families, and it felt natural to imagine creating our own little one someday. Eventually though, those conversations shifted—from our future to my future.

I always knew Jake would make a wonderful father. I saw it in the way he showed up for his nieces and nephews—not just for birthdays or holidays, but in the small, ordinary moments. He’d stop by after school to say hello, take them out to dinner, and tell them to order whatever they wanted. It was tender to witness that part of him, especially knowing how much the war still haunted him.

Jake once told me that falling in love had saved his life. It reminded him of the beauty in ordinary things—what it felt like to live outside the uniform, to feel human again. Civilian life brought its own kind of sacrifice, but also a quiet peace.

For the first time, we both had found a love that allowed me to imagine a long-term future—one filled with adventure, family, stability, and hope. And then, within months, I had to grieve its loss. I would never get to see the kind of father Jake might have become, or how it might have softened and shaped him. I knew fatherhood wouldn’t erase his PTSD, his TBI, or the memories that followed him home, but I also knew it could have offered him a sense of renewal—a reason to keep building toward something new.

I remember a nurse asking me, while he was in hospice, if I had saved his sperm before he started chemotherapy so I could have his child after he was gone. The question stopped me. For me, that idea was too painful. I couldn’t imagine raising our child alone, carrying both love and loss in the same breath.

I’ll never know what it would have been like to be pregnant with Jake’s child. In time I had hope—when I was ready—having a child with a loving partner would happen again, in its own time.I knew I had to grieve the dream of the family we would never have—and trust that maybe, one day, I might find it again in another form.Still, I often think about how different life might have been if all of this had not happened to our love story.

And here I am now, 36 years old, having just had my first child. At my 20-week ultrasound, I learned it was a boy. In that moment, I felt Jake’s spirit with me—quiet, steady, familiar—as if some part of him had found its way back into my life after all.

Becoming a mother has opened a new chapter I once thought I’d lost—or at least would never feel the same way about. It doesn’t replace the dream I had with Jake, but it reminds me that love can return in new shapes, in new seasons. I like to think he would be proud—that somewhere, he’s smiling at the life I’ve continued to build.

Becoming a mother—giving birth—feels as close to a spiritual journey as it gets, and as raw and human as walking beside Jake through his death. I once believed birth and death were opposite ends of the spectrum, but now I see how they mirror each other—both thresholds of transformation, both sacred in their own way.

There are moments, rocking my son in the quiet of the night, when I feel Jake nearby—not as a ghost, but as a presence.

It reminds me that love is not bound by time or form. It changes shape, continues on, and finds its way back to us in ways the heart can recognize, even when the mind cannot explain.

It’s wild to think how different my life looks and feels now—and, at the same time, how it can feel like no time has passed at all. I still feel 24 sometimes, trying to figure out a life with a man who would forever shape the way I love.

Having a child is a reminder that life is always changing, always offering us something new—if we can slow down enough to notice what’s in front of us.

Jake prepared me for motherhood in this way. I wanted to be fully present with him, to soak in every moment, because I knew one day those moments would become memories. Now, when I reflect on them, I feel comforted. And as I continue to grow into motherhood, I see the same truth unfolding: these newborn days are fleeting, and all I can do is show up—with patience, presence, and love—and let it all unfold.

One of the ways I managed to travel cheaply was by searching endlessly for the lowest fares. A trick I learned: fly into major international hubs first, then book a separate ticket to your final destination. It often meant 24+ hour travel days and rarely a simple one-way flight. But at that time, every penny mattered. I wasn’t flying somewhere for a quick weeklong trip—I wanted to stay at least 1–3 months, so stretching my budget was essential.

Tip: Search flights by the entire month if you have flexibility. You can save hundreds of dollars this way. I often used Skyscanner and would search by month to see which days were cheapest—the calendar view shows you how drastically prices shift day to day.

The first country I visited, once I’d tied up the major financial and logistical pieces back in the U.S., was Peru. I chose South America because Jake and I had once dreamed of exploring it together—it was the trip we’d planned before his diagnosis. The year before, while I was teaching yoga in Nicaragua, he had booked a ticket to meet me so we could keep traveling south, by plane or maybe even by boat. But we never made it. Jake flew back to Michigan from Spain to get a lump in his neck checked—the one that would become his second cancer diagnosis.

This first international trip was layered with meaning. It felt like stepping into a journey we had once imagined together, but now I was carrying it forward alone. I knew I needed to return in four months for my sister’s wedding, which gave me enough time to wander—yet still stay tethered to home. Those months became a bridge between worlds, giving me space to ground myself and to move through the quiet, disorienting shift from partner to widow.

I learned quickly that the way I loved to travel wasn’t about checking off sights or rushing through multiple countries. Instead, it was about staying put long enough to feel rooted, to live inside a place rather than skim its surface. Traveling solo made this even more important—it wasn’t just about finding connection with the people and community around me, but about finding a deeper connection with myself.

In Peru, I found a place called The Healing House—a kind of residency for people in the healing and creative professions. You paid for a bed, but it was more than a hostel. People stayed for months, sometimes years, working on projects, teaching yoga, or offering workshops. It felt perfectly aligned: I wanted to teach yoga, but I also knew I needed space to begin writing about my journey with Jake. For the first time, I had room to integrate my experience through words.

I journaled as much as I could during Jake’s diagnosis, but living inside that reality made it almost impossible to truly process. I’ve always needed time and space to reflect—to be present for what’s unfolding, and then to integrate it later, when I’m ready. Writing after the fact gave me that distance: I could still feel the emotions, but I wasn’t consumed by them. Even now, nine years later, I feel more connected to that time because of the space I’ve had to look back and make meaning from it.

That’s what healing from grief feels like to me. The grief never disappears, but it shifts. It doesn’t linger the way it once did. You can feel it, let it move through, and then return to the present moment. The rhythm becomes: feel and release, feel and release—until the weight softens enough that you can keep living fully in your everyday life.

For the months I was there, I wrote—some days the words came easily, other days not at all. It still felt surreal to not have Jake in my life and to be on this next part of my journey, which was really about taking care of myself. After months of caregiving, quiet didn’t come easily. Rest felt foreign at first, like a language my body had forgotten how to speak. I was finally able to sleep through the night and not worry about what I needed to do for him. I was now in control of my own schedule. It felt partly relieving and partly like another kind of grief—to realize I now had to decide how I wanted to spend my days, alone. I was now alone.

And so I would wake up, make breakfast, write for a few hours, then either teach or take a yoga class before walking around Cusco, Peru, where I was living. I started to find my places—the café that knew my order, the market stand where I’d buy fruit, the quiet corners that felt like home. I made friends who would sometimes join me, but often I wandered alone, letting the city reveal itself one unexpected moment at a time. The llamas that sat outside the house became part of my daily landscape, a reminder that life kept moving, quietly and steadily.

It was in these small rituals—the walk through Cusco, the quiet mornings, the familiar faces—that I began to remember what it felt like to belong to my own life again. Grief had stripped away any illusion of control, but here I was learning a new rhythm: one built on presence instead of planning, curiosity instead of certainty.

Each day, I wrote and rested and moved, and little by little, I felt my life begin to expand around the emptiness rather than collapse into it. Healing wasn’t something I chased; it was something that found me in the ordinary—the sound of church bells echoing through the valley, the warmth of afternoon sun, the laughter and smiles of people passing by.

I didn’t know it then, but those quiet days in Cusco were teaching me how to live again—not by holding on, but by allowing myself to be changed by what remained.

I used to think travel was about finding a way out. But Peru showed me that presence—not escape—is where the journey truly begins. Travel gave me space to breathe again, to loosen fear’s grip, to feel alive in my own skin. It reminded me that healing often happens not in motion, but in the quiet act of arriving.