However Mother’s Day lands for you this year, whether it’s softly, sharply, or not at all, you’re not alone inside it. And if it stirs more than it settles, you’re actually in good company.
Tomorrow’s also the full moon. It’s the kind that pulls on what’s been tucked away. It brings light to the ache you thought you buried and says, “Let’s look again.”
So I want to tell you something personal. Something I promised I would.
Let me tell you why I made my upcoming grieving companion and why I’m the one walking beside you through grief.
I didn’t become a grief specialist because it sounded interesting. I became it by surviving the kind of losses that don’t leave you the same.
When I was a child, grief was already living in our house. My younger brother died the day he was born. He was the only boy. The last chance, as my parents saw it.
I never met him, but I lived inside the after of his absence. Every year: “Today would’ve been his tenth birthday… his fifteenth…” His ghost had a seat at the table before I even understood what grief was.
At 18, I lost my grandmother. She was my safe place, my anchor. And she was definitely the one who truly saw me. It was the first time I learned that love could vanish. And that changed me.
In my 30s, I lost my sister Lorraine, suddenly. Ten days later, my father died. It felt like grief came back for seconds before I could even breathe.
I was holding it all together, going through a divorce, moving, raising my son, building a life, becoming the reliable one. But inside I was unravelling.
Then my oldest sister died, followed by my mother. I held her hand as she left this world. It was the end of an era, and I knew it.
And then, four months and one day after my mother’s death, on the day I moved into a new home with my new husband, I lost my son, Connor. My only child. He was in a crosswalk when a distracted driver ran a red light. He was 22. And that loss… it should’ve taken me with it. But it didn’t.
I floated. I dissociated. I disappeared for a while. But eventually, breath returned. Slowly.
I began calling my relationship with him Connor 2.0, because the love didn’t die. It changed shape.
Nearly a decade later, I lost my last sister, the final sibling. She’d been missing for years. Declared missing with no answers until she was found. Dead. Ten years after the first goodbye, grief returned not as a wave, but as a reckoning.
Here’s what I learned:
Grief doesn’t respect time. It doesn’t expire. And it doesn’t care if you’re “doing better.”
Grief rearranges the architecture of who you are. It changes how you love, how you speak, how you hold joy, and how long you stay in a grocery store aisle before breaking down over a box of cereal.
I share all this not for sympathy, but for recognition. To say: if your grief is long, layered, strange, or still surfacing years later, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re just in relationship with your loss.
That’s why I’m creating this companion. It’s meant to walk with you. It’s not a course or a checklist as much as a presence. Mine, yours, your grief’s, your loves’. It’s a place to breathe.
It’s the beginning of something sacred. Not healing in the way the world defines it, but healing as in wholeness. Being witnessed, allowed, and heard.
The grief companion is coming soon. If you’re walking through something tender whether it’s known or unnamed, this might be for you.
PS) This isn’t about toughness. It’s about transmutation. I’m not here because I survived grief better than anyone. I’m here because I let it shape me. I didn’t just lose. I listened. I didn’t just break. I became. And if you’re carrying something that’s changed you, if your love still lives in the ache, maybe you’re not meant to “move on” either. Maybe you’re here to carry it forward, too. Not alone and untouched. But fully human. Fully feeling. Fully here.
