Life is Messy: Lessons from Profound Grief

You can’t control every outcome, but you can choose how to live after loss.

A woman once asked me, “What would you do differently? What advice would you give to someone else so they wouldn’t have to face what you’ve faced?”

Her words felt like a slap, or a weight on my chest. For a moment I couldn’t breathe. Grief is already heavy, and questions like these press down even harder. Behind the words I heard the unspoken accusation: This must have been your fault.

In 2001, my 16-year-old son, Christopher, took his life. Since then, I have walked the long road of grief, stumbling through questions that have no real answers. His absence reshaped everything I thought I knew about life, love, and motherhood. In many ways, that was the beginning of becoming someone new. The person I was before Christopher’s death no longer exists; grief reshaped me into a different self I am still learning to know.

What would I have done differently? My honest answer is: nothing. I loved him. I listened. I provided support. I sought counsel. And yet, his life was his own. His death was his own. Just as mine is mine.

As parents, we imagine we can protect our children from every danger. But the truth is, we can love them, guide them, and still not control the choices they make. I am not saying his death was inevitable. But I am saying it was outside my control. That is one of the hardest lessons of grief: we may be present, but we cannot control the outcome, not even as mothers.

I am not glad it happened. Christopher’s absence will always ache. But grief has taught me that what I can control is what I learn from it, and how I live in its aftermath.

Even now, more than two decades later, I sometimes catch myself thinking in “before and after” terms: Christopher would not recognize this couch. Christopher will not know we moved to Kentucky. A part of my mind still imagines his return, and perhaps that is how a parent copes with the unthinkable.

Learning how to stop the event was never the lesson. The lesson is that life is messy, often painful, and always unpredictable. We do not get to keep everything safe. We do not get to hold back every storm.

Grief is not a problem to be solved, but a landscape to be walked. At first it is jagged and unfamiliar, but over time, you learn where to place your feet.

The question becomes: What do we do with that knowledge?

Lessons Grief Has Taught Me

There is no rush. Grief has no timeline. Healing does not follow a calendar. It takes as long as it takes, and often it circles back when you least expect it. Even when others think you should be “better,” your heart may still be tender. That is normal.
Cheering someone up does not help. Presence matters more than pep talks. Sometimes the best gift is to sit quietly beside someone and allow their pain to exist.
Grief is physical. It can ache in the bones, knot the stomach, and erupt in sound—screams, sobs, silence. The body carries grief as much as the heart.
Grief takes an enormous amount of energy and brain space. With profound loss it can be years before your body has full strength and your brain has regained its capacity to think.
Grief has layers. Just when you think you have moved through it, another wave rises. That is not failure, it is simply the nature of love and loss.
Rituals help. Each year on Christopher’s birthday and the anniversary of his death, Jerry and I light a candle and let it burn all day. Blowing it out at night feels like a small death all over again, but it is our way of remembering, of holding our loss together, and of keeping Christopher’s presence woven into our lives.

I used to ask myself: What did I do wrong? What did I do to deserve this? Over time I have come to understand that these are the wrong questions. The deeper lesson is not about fault, but about living with what we cannot change.

People often talk about “getting back to your old self.” But grief does not work that way. There is no going back. Instead, grief moves us forward, through the pain, through the lessons, into someone new. I am not the same person I was before Christopher died. None of us are the same after profound loss. We incorporate what we have learned into who we are now, the “new me.”

Life is messy. It is painful. It is beautiful. And it is fleeting.

What grief has taught me is this: we cannot control everything that happens, but we can choose how to live, how to love, and how to keep going, even when the path is broken open by loss.

Christopher is gone, but love is not. Love is what allows me to keep going, to learn, and to keep shaping my life, even in the messiness of grief.

If you are grieving, know this: your process is yours alone. There is no right way, no timeline, and no finish line. Be gentle with yourself.

And if there is any circle to close, it is this: I will never return to who I was before, but I am still here, becoming, learning, and carrying love forward as the new me.