Somewhere between desert mornings, long hikes, and quiet evenings outside the trailer, I found myself sitting with a thought I had avoided saying out loud for a long time:
I think everything happens for a reason.
Even writing those words feels risky in grief spaces.
I understand why so many grieving people struggle with that phrase. When spoken carelessly, it can make devastating loss feel reduced to a lesson instead of something sacred and unbearable.
I know what it feels like to hear explanations when what you need is presence.
And I would never want to do that.
The truth is, when I say everything happens for a reason, I don’t mean that every tragedy has a purpose or that every loss can be explained.
I don’t know why Lily died.
I never will.
What I mean is that I believe there is meaning woven through our lives, even when we can’t see it. I believe our experiences shape us in ways we often don’t understand until much later. And sometimes what initially feels senseless reveals something important—not about why it happened, but about who we become because we lived through it.
I don’t believe suffering is beautiful. I don’t believe loss is fair. And I certainly don’t believe Lily died for some tidy reason I can explain.
I can’t.
But somewhere during this trip—away from routine, away from noise, surrounded by open sky and silence—I realized that grief hadn’t taken that belief away. If anything, it had transformed it.
Not because grief gave me answers.
But because grief changed the way I experience life itself.
It changed the way I understand connection.
Love.
Presence.
Meaning.
I find myself paying closer attention to the ways meaning reveals itself.
And maybe that realization has been unfolding beneath the surface of my writing for years.
The truth is, this wasn’t a completely new belief. I’ve carried some version of it for most of my adult life. My work in hypnosis and my longstanding spiritual curiosity had already opened me to the possibility that our lives hold meanings we can’t always see.
In many ways, that perspective helped me navigate the challenges of raising Lily with her disabilities.
But after she died, those beliefs were no longer philosophical. They became something I had to wrestle with personally.
At first, grief was survival.
Learning how to breathe inside devastation.
Learning how to carry Lily forward while continuing to live.
But lately, my writing has been asking something different:
What did grief quietly reveal in me?
For years, grief felt like a story about what had been taken from me. And in many ways, it still is. There will always be an empty chair, an absent voice, a daughter who should be here.
But over time, grief became something else too.
It taught me to notice.
To pay attention to what matters.
To listen when something inside me says no.
To value connection over performance.
To appreciate ordinary days.
It didn’t happen all at once. And it certainly didn’t happen because I wanted it to.
It happened because grief changed the landscape of my life, and eventually I had to learn how to live within that new landscape.
This year especially, I’ve been noticing how much of becoming is really recognition—seeing what was always there underneath the roles, expectations, and identities I inhabited for decades.
One of the deepest realizations surfaced around Mother’s Day.
For a long time, I thought the ache of that holiday was simply missing Lily.
And of course, it is that too.
I miss her with a longing that still feels almost physical. Like a craving that can never fully be satisfied. I still reach for her in ordinary moments.
But this year, something deeper surfaced underneath that grief.
I realized I didn’t only lose my daughter.
I lost the version of myself the world knew as Lily’s mom.
For decades, motherhood wasn’t simply part of my life. It was the structure of my life.
The appointments.
The routines.
The advocacy.
The community.
The people who knew me through her.
She left an impression everywhere she went, and because of that, I was constantly reflected back to myself through the role of being her mother.
When she died, that reflection disappeared too.
And suddenly I understood why Mother’s Day carried a grief that felt larger than the holiday itself.
The moment I named it, something loosened inside me.
Not healed.
Not resolved.
But recognized.
Like a splinter I had been carrying for years finally working its way to the surface.
Even my friendships began looking different through that lens.
Recently, I found myself feeling unexpectedly resentful after spending time with friends. I felt unseen and unmet, wanting a depth they weren’t offering.
And then something honest surfaced beneath the reaction:
They hadn’t changed.
I had.
I was asking people to meet needs I had never fully spoken aloud. Projecting my own longing onto relationships that had always existed comfortably at the surface.
For the first time, instead of trying to force those connections into something deeper, I simply saw them clearly.
Some friendships are beautiful for lightness.
Some for history.
Some for depth.
Some for witnessing.
Not every relationship has to hold every part of me anymore.
That realization felt strangely freeing.
Grief has stripped away so much pretending in my life.
So much automatic yes.
So much performing.
So much loyalty to versions of myself that no longer fit.
The person I am today is not the person I was before Lily died.
I would give anything to have her back and remain who I was.
But that isn’t the choice I was given.
The only choice I’ve ever had is what to do with the life that remains.
And when I look honestly at that life, I can see how grief has shaped me in ways I never expected. It has softened some parts of me and strengthened others. It has stripped away what no longer fits and invited me to become more fully myself.
Maybe that’s what the phrase has come to mean for me.
Not that every tragedy has a purpose.
Not that every loss can be justified.
But that meaning and grief can exist side by side.
That life continues to shape us, even through the most heartbreaking circumstances.
And that sometimes we don’t recognize the significance of an experience until years later, when we can finally see what it revealed.
I still don’t understand why Lily died.
I may never understand.
But I no longer believe death is the end of love.
I no longer believe connection disappears simply because form changes.
And I no longer need grief and meaning to cancel each other out in order for both to exist.
Somewhere between desert mornings and long stretches of open road, I realized becoming is not about leaving grief behind.
It’s about allowing grief to reveal what was always waiting underneath.