11/16/2025
Grief is such a strange companion.
It shows up in the most unexpected ways; in the quiet, in the mundane, in the moments when I think I’ve found my footing again. And then suddenly it hits me like a bulldozer… collapsing me, stopping me in my tracks, demanding to be felt.
As I sit with the reality of my mom’s passing, I keep replaying the last two years and how much she suffered, how bravely she drove herself here from Nevada, how she left the home she’d last created with my dad; just to be closer to us. She wanted to be part of our lives. She wanted to witness this chapter. And I wanted a real chance to heal something between us that had always felt unfinished.
For a moment, it felt like a door had finally opened, a chance at the kind of connection I had never truly had with her, but always deeply craved. But within a month of her moving here, everything changed. She declined so quickly that the ground gave out beneath us before I could even understand what was happening.
And the truth is… part of me still wonders if I could have done more.
If I missed something.
If she’d still be here had I made different choices.
Grief does that, it loops you in circles of “maybe” and “what if,” spinning stories from the threads of the past that you can never quite rewrite.
But lately, a deeper layer of reflection has surfaced; the curiosity about what could have happened if I had found the courage, earlier, to have the conversations I was afraid of. If I had been brave enough to go deeper before things became so fragile.
Before I drifted away in my own search for freedom and sovereignty.
What would it have been like if I had used my healing not just to protect myself… but to soften toward the possibility of who she truly was beneath the layers of her hurt, her armor, her trauma?
There was a time before I awakened, before I understood myself the way I do now, where she was part of my life, but only on the surface. It was relationship built on expectation, on obligation… connection with a cost. I didn’t know how to see beyond that. And I don’t think she knew how to show anything different.
And yet… even inside that ache, I come back to another truth:
I did everything I could.
Everything I knew how to do.
I gave her my time, my energy, my health, my practice, my entire being. I sacrificed so much to make sure she had what she needed in her last years, even when it stretched me to my edges.
Still… with a narcissistic mother, it often doesn’t feel like enough.
Not in life.
Not in grief.
Not in the stories the mind tries to rewrite afterward.
Some days the weight of it all torments me; the should-haves, the maybe-I-could-haves, the ache of what could have been if both of us had been different, or healed, or ready at the same time.
But underneath all of that, beneath the grief, beneath the regret, beneath the rewriting; there is a quieter truth:
There is a peace inside me.
A softening.
A knowing.
A place where my heart finally exhales.
I’m grateful for that peace.
I’m grateful for the healing that came in ways I didn’t plan for.
And I’m grateful that even in the strangest corners of grief…
I can feel myself returning home to me.
I’d give anything to have them both back, to experience a version of life where they were fully here, fully present, fully healed… but that wasn’t the soul contract. And as much as my human heart aches for what could have been, my spirit knows I have to honor what was and what is.
This is a chapter where I learn to stand in myself. Where I carry the love, the lessons, the wounds, and the wisdom, all of it forward.
Where I choose to live in a way that honors their stories, but doesn’t repeat them.
Where I remember that part of my path was always meant to be walked in my own sovereignty.
Here’s to honoring the contract, embracing the growth, and letting this chapter, as bittersweet as it is, become a doorway back to myself.
