I didn’t plan to end up here. Writing about grief, loss, and the pieces of myself scattered across decades. But on August 5th, the day my mom suddenly died, something inside me broke wide open. One week after her 70th birthday, the woman who had been my anchor for 41 years was simply just, gone. And with her went the version of me that knew how to stay upright in this world.

But if I’m going to be honest, my story didn’t start on August 5th. It started April 7, 1990.

My father died tragically when I was 7, and the world taught me early that nothing in this life is promised. Something inside that little girl shut down in order to survive. She learned to build walls, decorate them with jokes, and call it strength. They were thick and efficient. It was just enough to keep her moving, keep her functioning, keep her pretending she was fine. And for a long time, it worked. They let me grow up; they taught me stand on my own two feet.

But those walls were never real. They were my armor.

And on the day my mom died, that armor finally split open.

I didn’t feel like myself anymore. In fact, I didn’t even feel anchored to the earth at all. It was as if the gravity that held me in place disappeared, and I was just floating. Untethered. Directionless. Just walking through the world with the eyes of a grieving child who had never truly been heard.

Grief this time wasn’t familiar. It wasn’t the same sadness I’d carried quietly for decades. It was new, terrifying, and heavy in a way I couldn’t explain.

My mom was my constant. The witness to my entire life. The person who steadied me without even trying.

And when she died, I started to feel myself unravel.

It was that unraveling, the crumbling of everything I thought made me “strong” that led me into intensive therapy. Because the truth is, I couldn’t outrun that 7 year old anymore. She had been waiting, patiently, for me to finally turn around and meet her where she’d been stuck decades ago.

This blog is where I’ll tell the story of that meeting.
Of the walls I built, the ones that fell, and the ones I’m slowly learning to rebuild with intention instead of fear.

This is where I’m piecing together the girl who grieved too early and the woman that’s grieving now.

This is where I try to make sense of being unanchored and how I’m learning to root myself again, even in a world forever changed.

This is me grieving.