Hi Friends,

Grief after death carries a weight that is undeniable and sacred.

When someone dies, there’s shock, devastation, disbelief, and a kind of finality that steals your breath.  You may feel anger toward God, confusion about timing, or heartbreak over words left unsaid.  Death doesn’t ask permission.  It just takes.  And I would never, ever suggest that this kind of loss is anything less than horrific, confusing, or unbearable.

But there is another kind of grief that doesn’t get talked about as honestly:  the grief that comes when someone chooses to leave your life.

This kind of loss is quieter, but it cuts deeper in a different way.

Because instead of asking “why did this happen?”, you find yourself asking “why wasn’t I enough?”.

When someone dies, the love doesn’t feel like rejection.  When someone leaves, it’s personal.  They chose to leave YOU.

I want to be clear about something that matters deeply to me.  I would never wish anything bad on anyone who chose to leave my life.  I am so grateful that my ex-husband and others I’ve loved are alive, healthy, and able to build the lives that make them happy, even if it wasn’t me that was part of that happiness.  Death is not the alternative.  This isn’t a comparison of which pain is “worse.”  It’s an acknowledgment that the shape of the pain is different.

Loss by choice leaves room for hope and that’s what makes it so brutal.  Because they’re still out there.  Alive.  Existing.  Making decisions every day that don’t include you, on purpose.  You wonder if they think about you, miss you, or might change their mind.  The door could open again, but when it doesn’t, the disappointment resets all over.

Since 2020, loss has piled up in my life in ways I never anticipated.  It’s been nonstop.  I’ve lost 3 dogs I loved deeply.  I’ve lost family members to illness.  I’ve lost my marriage and with it, an entire in-law family I thought I would always be included in.  I’ve lost relationships that felt like home.  I’ve lost the hope in a relationship I thought might happen where the person turned out to be nothing like I thought.  My spirit has continually been broken time and time again.

Even earlier than that, in 2019, my daughter graduated high school and left to build her own life.  She now lives several hours away.  That loss was necessary and good and something I’m so endlessly proud of, but it still marked the beginning of a season where everything familiar kept changing.  Everything has been steadily unraveling.

Just yesterday we laid my daughter’s best friend to rest.  There aren’t even words to describe how sad that is and how much I feel for my daughter’s loss (and of course her family’s loss).  She lost the person she ran to about everything.  The one person who knew and loved everything about her with no conditions.  It’s a heartbreak that isn’t comparable.  But the one thing my daughter can focus on is it wasn’t personal.  Her best friend didn’t choose to leave her and the reunion in Heaven is going to be nothing short of AMAZING.

However, today, I’ve also lost my best friend.  But in a very different way.  It was by choice.

Last summer I shared that I had a situationship that ended.  However, because of how much he’s meant to me and for how long, I let him back in.  And he let me back in.  Over and over again.  Almost another year has passed now and this time it’s really final.  It’s over between us for good.  After knowing him for the better part of 20 years and being “together” off and on for the last almost 2 years, it’s over and I’m devastated.

My favorite human, my safe place with no judgement, my person.  I can’t remember a time he wasn’t in my life and in my thoughts.  He’s just always been there.  Like a circle, there was no beginning and I never thought there’d be an ending.  But now, I have to somehow find a way to move forward without him.  And it feels impossible.

I can’t remember the first time I saw him, met him, or our first hug so very long ago.  He just slipped in like he’s always been.  But now we’ve experienced our last of everything and I know I’ll never forget it.  I have to let go of all the plans we had, the shows and movies we started and never finished, the football games we’ll never get to go to, that restaurant we never got to try, another New Year’s Eve I won’t spend with him, and the fact that we’ll no longer make new memories.  Never again, forever.

Some people come into your life and feel like your people.  And when those people leave, it doesn’t just hurt.  It rearranges you.  It shatters you.

I know in my head that not every love is meant to last forever.  I know compatibility and timing matter.  I know feelings don’t always mean forever.  But my heart didn’t get that memo.  I’m broken over this.

Grief doesn’t follow logic and love doesn’t disappear just because it didn’t work out.  Maybe the hardest truth about grief of any kind is that it doesn’t invalidate what came before it.  Death doesn’t mean the love was wasted.  Being left by choice doesn’t mean there weren’t amazing memories made or that you’re unlovable, even though it feels that way.

Sometimes grief is simply the cost of having loved someone so deeply and genuinely in a world where nothing is guaranteed to stay and people change at different times.

But if I’m being honest (which I ALWAYS try to be), I would still choose love all over again, even knowing how much it hurts in the end, whether through death or choice.  Because the alternative is a life untouched.  A life where he was never a part of it.  And that feels like a different kind of loss altogether.  I guess what they say is true:  maybe it’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.  At least I have the memories of “that one time when…”.

I will always love you and you will always be my person in every way.  Always.  Your shoes are just too big too fill.

Te amo, mi amor.  And that orange thing too.

Always,