As I face my fourth Mother’s Day without my beloved younger daughter Dana, who died on September 17, 2021, after a long and valiant battle with addiction, I can feel the quiet rumblings of grief rising inside me again.
Mother’s Day feels different now.
Softer in some moments. Sharper in others. One minute I feel gratitude and love overflowing from my heart.
The next minute I want to crawl back into bed with chocolate and avoid all human interaction until Tuesday.
Grief is funny that way. Not funny-ha-ha. Funny-strange.
Part of me wants to cry.
Part of me wants to write.
Part of me wants to scream into a pillow, take a long walk, meditate, or reorganize a kitchen drawer for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
Apparently, this is my nervous system’s idea of coping.
For years, I have carried this grief quietly while continuing to live my life.
I kept teaching, helping others heal, showing up for family, answering emails, paying bills, and pretending I wasn’t emotionally ambushed by a song in the grocery store.
At the same time, I have written unpublished books, poems, letters, prayers, and late-night reflections to Dana that no one has ever seen.
I did publish my first chapter of An Addict’s Mother: Loving Your Child and Yourself.
But lately, something inside me has been whispering that perhaps it’s time to share more openly.
Not because I have mastered grief. I have not.
And not because I have “moved on.” I never will.
But because I know there are other mothers (and fathers) carrying invisible heartbreak while trying to function like everything is normal.
Many of us become experts at smiling while internally trying not to emotionally collapse in the Walgreens parking lot.
We carry our grief quietly.
We make dinner.
We answer texts.
We say “I’m okay.”We continue living while loving and missing someone at the exact same time.
And somehow, we survive.
So on May 14th at noon CDT, I will be going LIVE on Substack for Dana’s Light: How to Survive the Death of Your Child.
This will not be polished or perfect. It will simply be real.
A gentle space for compassion, connection, honesty, tears, memories, healing, and yes… probably even a little humor, because grief and laughter often sit surprisingly close together.
Dana’s Light reminds me not only of what I lost, but of what I was blessed enough to have. Her laughter. Her wisdom. Her humor. Her enormous heart. Her light.
A light that continues to live in me, with me, and through me.
If you are grieving too — whether you lost a child, a parent, a partner, a dream, or even a version of yourself — I hope you will join us.
We will gather together in grief and gratitude, and remind one another that even broken hearts still carry light.
If you subscribe, I’ll send a reminder and the replay if you can’t make it live.