Heavenly Birthdays…Reflections on Grief, Love, and Making Meaning

It was 15 years ago this week that my mother died.

Fifteen years.

Sometimes that feels like an eternity, and other times it feels like yesterday. It's hard to believe that I've lived 15 years of my life without her physically here.

I haven't written a blog in over a month. I'm not sure why. The busyness of life? Taking a pause on all my “mental processing”?

Or maybe I just didn't feel inspired to write.

But something stirred in me this morning while listening to one of my many podcasts about life after death and grief.

I was listening to Anderson Cooper's podcast “all there is” (highly recommend it!), and a woman was reflecting on how she navigated the death of her husband when she was just 46 years old.

As I listened to her story, I was reminded of just how hard grief can be. And how much we learn about ourselves and others through the process.

Sometimes we feel so supported, surrounded by love and compassion.

And other times, we feel so utterly alone and grief-stricken.

It's quite the journey.

In my last blog, I shared more about how I managed my grief during those first few years after my mother's death. And I left off talking about how my curiosity began opening doors to different ways of understanding ourselves, our energy, and perhaps even our souls.

I still want to share more about those discoveries.

But with the anniversary of my mother's death, and after listening to this podcast, I found myself reflecting on something else.

How much has losing my mother actually changed me? And what have I learned about grief, death, and life along the way?

As I've shared before, I'm someone who spends a lot of time reflecting, questioning, analyzing, and trying to make sense of things.

It's just how I'm wired.

And boy, have I spent a lot of time doing that throughout this journey!

But something I find interesting when I look back on those first years after my mom died is that I didn't spend much time questioning her death itself.

As devastating as it was, I accepted it. I knew how much she had suffered, and as much as I wanted her here with me, I also knew that her death was, in many ways, a release for her.

I didn't get caught up in bargaining with God, blaming the doctors, or questioning why this had happened to her. Well, I blamed the doctors a bit, but that didn’t last long. 

I grieved. Deeply.

And at the same time, almost immediately after she died, I began having experiences that sparked my curiosity about what happens after death.

Those experiences didn't take away my sadness. But they gave me something alongside it.

Hope.

And eventually, a sense of internal peace.

I sometimes wonder how differently I might have experienced my grief without those experiences. Would I have gotten stuck in anger, regret, or blame? Would I have struggled more with accepting her death?

I don't know.

But I do know that the meaning I found along the way helped me tremendously.

And I think that's something worth reflecting on.

Finding meaning in our grief doesn't mean we stop feeling the pain of our loss.

We can accept what happened, find some peace with it, and still feel tremendous sadness that someone we love is no longer physically here.

Both can be true.

And sometimes, no matter how much we've learned or how much meaning we've made, we don't need to analyze our feelings or figure them out.

We just need to feel them.

I believe our feelings need space to move through us. Sadness, anger, regret, confusion, and even joy. We don't always have to understand why we're feeling something or how long it will last.

Sometimes we simply need to allow ourselves to experience it.

And while all of that has been an important part of my own experience with grief, there's something else I've been thinking about lately.

I don't believe we're ever truly alone.

I've had some interesting conversations with friends recently about life after death and what happens when we leave this physical world.

I find it fascinating how differently we all see things.

And I truly respect that everyone has their own beliefs, shaped by their experiences, upbringing, and where they are in their own journeys.

I'm certainly not claiming that what I believe is 100% true.

How could I?

But it feels true to me.

And I don't think I fully appreciated until recently just how much those beliefs have helped me live with the loss of my mother.

I believe that life doesn't end when our physical bodies die. That our souls, our energy, or whatever you want to call it, continue on in some way.

But here's something I've come to realize is especially important to me.

It's not just about believing that someday, when I die, I'll be reunited with my mom.

It's believing that I don't have to wait until then to have a relationship with her.

That somehow, in ways I may never fully understand, we can still be connected right here, right now.

Through dreams, signs, intuition, nature, and those moments when we just KNOW something without being able to explain how or why.

I've shared so many of those experiences throughout my blogs.

And I honestly don't know how I would have survived losing my mother without the belief that she is still somehow with me.

Nothing replaces being able to hug her, hear her voice, laugh with her, or simply sit across from her and have a conversation.

I've said that before, and I mean it.

But believing that our relationship didn't end when she died has changed everything for me.

The possibility that she hasn't missed a thing.

That she's still somehow part of my life.

That our relationship hasn't ended, but has simply taken on a different form.

That brings me an enormous amount of comfort.

And perhaps that's one of the biggest themes running through this entire story.

Not just how we survive the loss of someone we love, but how we learn to live with that loss while continuing to love them. And perhaps, in ways we never imagined, even continue communicating with them after they're physically gone.

Something else that struck me while listening to the podcast this morning was the woman's reflection on joy.

She talked about how experiencing profound grief can actually deepen our capacity to experience joy.

And that really resonated with me.

When you've experienced the depths of sadness, when you've felt the pain of losing someone you love so deeply, you begin to recognize just how precious those moments of joy really are.

You know how quickly life can change.

You know that nothing is guaranteed.

And perhaps because of that, you find yourself appreciating the little things a bit more.

A beautiful sunset. A meaningful conversation. A belly laugh with someone you love. A quiet moment in nature.

The ordinary moments that, when you really stop and pay attention, aren't so ordinary after all.

Maybe grief doesn't just teach us about loss.

Maybe it also teaches us how to love, how to appreciate, and how to live a little more fully.

I think it's difficult to fully understand the depth of grief until you've experienced the loss of someone you deeply love.

And when I think about my own journey, I sometimes wonder who I would be today if my mother hadn't died.

Would I still be afraid of death? Of the spirit world? Would I still hold on to some of those fears and beliefs I grew up with?

Maybe.

I'll never know.

But what I do know is that losing my mother, as painful as it was, opened me up to an entirely different way of understanding life, death, and everything in between.

And I never could have imagined that.