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How I Live with Grief
On losing both parents and learning how to heal
It’s taken me nearly six years — six years filled with heaviness and unexpressed love — to write about this. Even now, I feel a nervous tremor; the words catch in my throat, sharp and thin. It’s not the act of writing itself. Writing usually soothes me. It clarifies the muddled landscape in my mind. But this… this feels different, like a cold wind blowing through the heart of my story.
I lost my father in 2018. Less than a year later, my mother passed away.
His death was sudden. Hers was slow, painful, and brutal. Both broke something in me — fractures I have learned to live with. I’ve stopped trying to seal them. In those spaces, their love still lives.
Sometimes I’m swept by small memories, like my father’s voice — hoarse, laughing, when he would come back home, pulling my leg, mocking my braids. Or the two of them together, standing beside me.
I never spoke to my mother about her dying — even when we both knew it was coming. Instead, I kept telling her she had to make it. She couldn’t abandon me to this world as an orphan.
Her final video message, filmed just days before her death, was a plea for me to take care of myself. She mentioned my sister, even my boyfriend at the time. And then, at the…
