Last night, my son asked me, “Do you ever wonder what Ara would look like when she’s 10?”
I answered without hesitation—I think about what she would look like every single day.
Three years ago, around this time, her dad and I met. We had our first date, and we talked for hours, dreaming up a collaboration between our two beauty and body care lines. We envisioned a future filled with love, creativity, and the family we would build together.
Now, three years later, I’m single. And our daughter is gone.
I often feel like I’m still standing in the wreckage of a life that was supposed to be mine, a future that was obliterated before it even had a chance to unfold. Losing a partner and a child—especially at the same time—feels like surviving a nuclear bomb. The blast itself is instantaneous, but the aftermath? It lingers. It’s the debris you wade through every day, the air thick with what was, the silence where laughter should have been.
Since my last blog post, a lot has changed. I moved. I started a new job. From the outside, it might seem like I’m “moving forward.” But inside, I’m still navigating the ruins, trying to make sense of what’s left and what I even want to rebuild.
Grief is strange that way—it doesn’t just mourn what was lost; it mourns what could have been. I grieve the life I once imagined with him, the future vision we created. I grieve the daughter we lost and the home we never made together, the laughter that never echoed in our walls, the milestones we never got to celebrate.
At times, it feels like I’m moving through life on autopilot, checking the boxes of survival but unsure of where I’m actually headed. Do I even want the same things I once did? Or has grief reshaped me so completely that I no longer recognize my own desires?
What I do know is this: healing isn’t about finding a way back to who I was before. That person no longer exists. Healing is about learning to carry the weight of loss while making space for whatever comes next—even when you have no idea what that is.
In Part 3, I’ll explore another kind of loss—the grief of friendships that faded, unraveled, or ended in the wake of everything I’ve been through. Because grief doesn’t just take away people we love in death—it can also take away the people we thought would stand beside us in life.
If you’re grieving a version of life you thought you’d have, I see you. You’re not alone in this.
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