Life After

Life after losing someone you truly loved is living under a shadow you didn’t choose.

It stretches across everything..days, moments, even the good ones. making life feel just a little darker than it used to be.

You can smile again. You can laugh again.

But it doesn’t feel the same. It feels smaller. Distant. Like something is missing from the sound of your own joy.

You watch happy people living freely in the moment and wonder if you will ever feel that way again..if anything will ever feel right or whole, even just for a moment. You wonder if joy will ever come without being followed by guilt, or sadness, or the sharp reminder of who isn’t there to share it.

There is a deep ache that settles into your chest. A loneliness that no room full of people can touch. A constant need to find pieces of them everywhere, in memories, in places, in strangers, in moments they should have been part of.

People say it just takes time.

But when you lose a child, time doesn’t heal that wound. There is no timeline for learning how to breathe with part of your soul missing.

As a mother, you lose a piece of yourself.

Not just as a parent, but as a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend. The person you were before no longer exists in the same way. And I don’t think you ever get that back.

The hole they leave behind doesn’t close. It stays. Forever.

You just learn how to cover it, how to function around it, how to hide it from the rest of the world so they don’t see how much is missing.

And how unfair is that?

How unfair that someone or something can take so much from you in a single moment. That a piece of you can simply be gone.

This is life after love and loss.

Not moving on—but moving forward, carrying what can never be replaced