Welcome to Life After Lil

Grief is the suitcase I can’t put down, even in a season meant for joy. This past week was heavy, even though I was surrounded by people I love—my two grown children, who I absolutely adore, and my husband, who remains one of the bright spots in my life. My husband and I were in another state helping our daughter settle into a new job and apartment. I’m grateful for that time with her, but even so, it felt like I was carrying a suitcase full of grief wherever I went. My son also flew in for the Thanksgiving holiday. We try to be together around that date—not to celebrate Thanksgiving, but to honor the loss of my oldest daughter, their oldest sibling, who died on Thanksgiving three years ago. I only had enough energy to give them my presence—and some forced good cheer. Taking them to see Denver sights, going out to dinners, listening to their stories, hearing them banter… those moments are what make these holidays bearable. That was all I had to offer. The holidays used to be s...

​ To My Dearest Lily It’s been three years since you left this world, and not a single day has passed when I haven’t thought of you—craved your little hand in mine, remembered the way your bright blue eyes sparkled, or felt that familiar lift inside me when you smiled. You brought so much life into our lives, and in your absence the silence has become its own presence. People say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but that word fonder doesn’t come close to what I feel. I crave you the way a sweet tooth aches—an ache that can never be satisfied. And yet I know, unequivocally, that you are not gone. You have simply transformed. I feel you. I receive your signs. I know when you are near because joy rises in me at the same time sorrow pulls at me—love and grief braided together. It hurts, but I’ll take that ache as a substitute for your presence. Some days, it’s enough. Today, it was. And I’m grateful. I’ve had to learn how to live without you these last three years, just as I once...

As I close this three-part series on grief—its collective echoes, its private chambers, its impossible tenderness—I find myself turning, as I always do this time of year, toward November. It’s the month that holds everything. Lily’s angelversary sits at its center like an ache I can feel before the calendar even flips. First in my dreams, then in my bones. My body always seems to remember before my mind gets the memo. One moment I’m functioning—answering texts, folding laundry. The next I’m swirling: emotional to numb, numb to sobbing on the dining room floor while her favorite pop songs pulse through the speakers, as if she’s just in the next room asking me to turn it up. And then the next morning… nothing. A strange, hollow quiet. Not peace, not calm—just a blank space where last night’s tidal wave had been. It still startles me how grief moves like unpredictable weather, sweeping in and receding on its own terms. November has a way of unearthing the memories I’ve tucked c...

The third and final reflection on collective and personal grief and on the love that survives when everything else is lost. Bearing Witness: Anne Frank and the Father Who Returned Alone When Otto Frank stepped off the train back into Amsterdam in June 1945, the city he returned to was both familiar and unrecognizable. The canals still shimmered in the summer light, the bells still rang from the Westerkerk, but the laughter of his wife and daughters was gone. The war had ended, but for Otto, the silence had only just begun. For weeks, he searched. He wrote letters, visited refugee centers, and followed every rumor that his daughters, Margot and Anne, might still be alive. In his pocket, he carried hope like a scrap of paper—folded, worn, almost transparent. But each inquiry ended the same way: a shake of the head, a name on a list, a quiet apology. Eventually, the truth reached him—Anne and Margot had not died in Auschwitz as first reported, but in Bergen-Belsen, of typhus, just wee...