Originally written July 30, 2026
“How Do You Survive This Much Goodbye?”
How do you survive when your world keeps ending?
People tell you grief comes in waves, but nobody tells you what happens when another wave crashes before you’ve even found your footing from the last one.
Just over a year.
That’s all it took for life to strip away the three hearts that made mine feel whole.
My dad.
My Spencer.
My mom.
Three names.
Three entire universes.
Three voices that filled the silence until all that remained was the echo.
I still reach for them without thinking.
I hear good news and wonder who I’ll call before I remember there is no one left to answer.
I see something funny and instinctively smile toward an empty room.
I still expect tiny paws to follow me through the house.
I still want to hear my dad’s voice.
I still want to hear my mom say my name.
Instead, there is only quiet.
Not peaceful quiet.
The kind that presses against your chest until breathing feels like work.
The kind that reminds you that every room is too big now.
People ask if I’m doing okay.
I don’t know how to answer that.
How do you explain that loneliness isn’t simply being alone?
Loneliness is realizing the people who knew every version of you are gone.
The people who remember your first laugh.
Your first heartbreak.
Your childhood fears.
The people who loved you before you ever had to earn it.
The people who knew your face before time changed it.
The people who could look at you and still see the child underneath.
Who sees that child now?
Who calls just because they wanted to hear your voice?
Who worries if you made it home?
Who tells you to drive carefully?
Who reminds you to eat?
Who loves you in the ordinary, forgettable ways that somehow become priceless the moment they’re gone?
I have never been afraid of being by myself.
I have always been afraid of becoming untethered.
Now I understand the difference.
The rope that held me to this world has been cut strand by strand.
First my dad.
Then Spencer, the little soul who somehow carried more love than her tiny body should have been able to hold.
Then my mom.
The last place that ever truly felt like home.
People say they’re still with me.
Maybe they are.
Maybe love doesn’t disappear.
Maybe it simply changes shape.
But there are nights when I would trade every comforting thought for one more ordinary day.
One more conversation.
One more hug.
One more bark from the other room.
One more “I love you.”
Grief has a cruel way of making you homesick for people instead of places.
And there is no map back to them.
So I wake up every morning carrying a life that feels impossibly heavy.
Not because I want to.
Because there isn’t another choice.
I carry them because I refuse to leave them behind.
I carry my father’s strength.
I carry Spencer’s unconditional love.
I carry my mother’s kindness, her smile, her face that lives on in mine every time I look in the mirror.
Some days that feels beautiful.
Most days it just hurts.
There are moments I wonder how one heart is expected to survive this much absence.
How it keeps beating after losing so much of what gave it rhythm.
I don’t have an answer.
I only know that somewhere beneath all this grief is love.
Love so enormous that even death couldn’t make it disappear.
And maybe that’s the cruelest part of all.
The greater the love…
the greater the silence it leaves behind.
FRD 2026