Saturday, I made myself go back. 

Back to the beautiful Emory campus. A stroll through the quaint and bustling Emory Village and the Candler School of Theology whose outside surroundings became my sanctuary for eight months.

A contemplative stroll back to the hospital where my husband lived for 8 months. A place I could not even enter the lobby the first month, then the place where we were finally together yet isolated from the outside world. A place that held both comfort and trauma in the same breath. A place that felt like home and a place that felt like hell all within in same twenty-four hours . A place we finally found answers.

I expected something louder when I walked through those doors. I was prepared for grief to rise up to meet me in a recognizable way—

     sharp, 

     heavy, 

     undeniable.

But what I found instead was numbness. And that surprised me!

Not emptiness, exactly.  Just a quiet flattening of everything.

I did what I have learned to do over these past six years:

          I slowed my breathing.

          I reframed my thoughts.

          I stayed present.

And underneath it all, and out of nowhere, they came:

     nervousness

      sadness 

     gratitude—all existing at once, none asking to be the loudest.

Ambiguous! That is the closest word I have.

I walked the same halls where I once knew, without anyone saying it,

         that we were nearing the end—

         the end of my role as caregiver,

         the end of his fight,

         the beginning of something I never asked for:     widowhood.

I found the alcove where I sat with my sons, preparing them to see their father when finally allowed, despite the weight of COVID restrictions. Those fateful words I began hearing –“Critical. Unstable. Guarded prognosis. Other family members only during end of life care.”

I remember choosing my words carefully then, trying to soften something that cannot be softened.

During my walk through that place there were small things I didn’t expect to remember—

         the sound of the elevator,

        the cafeteria’s familiar scent,

       the sterile air that somehow still lingers in memory.

All of it still there.

All of it unchanged.

Except the people—

I asked about them.

The names I had carried with me all this time—

the nurses, the valet, the transporters—

the ones who held doors, held space, held us together.

No one I asked remembered them. This devastated me! Mark, Sandra, Alton, Abachu, Blessing, Ryan, Linda Alton, Julie. 

But I guess that makes sense. This place has held so many stories, so many families, so many endings.

We were one of many.

But to me, they were my everything.

These were people I will likely never see again,

yet they changed me—

    shaped the way I understand and sit with grief,

    the way I show up for my clients,

       the way I love the people still here.

They were part of the hardest chapter of my life, and somehow also part of what was most human within it.

And even now,

I carry them forward—even if I am the only one who remembers their names.

Before I left, I stepped into the chapel.  There, I noticed a stained glass piece inside a circle; a tree, full of color and life.

And then it hit me—

I have this same image in my own kitchen window.

The same tree. Within a heart.

The same reaching branches.

The same quiet symbolism of growth.

I stood there for a moment, taking it in—

how something that once held me in one of the hardest seasons of my life now holds me in the space where I now nourish and gather and continue continue life. 

A reminder that growth does come.

Not in the way we expect.

Not without cost.

But it comes.

For 6 years now, my life has been this quiet pairing of gratitude among trauma and grief,

and making do while God makes a way .

And maybe the most unexpected truth of all is this: 

Daring to grieve has been the place where the most growth has happened for me. .

It is not the life I would have chosen.

But it is the life I have learned to walk in.

If you are grieving, or if you are loving someone who is, please hear this:

You are not doing it wrong. 

Even when it feels unclear, uneven, or impossibly heavy—

         Grief and gratitude can exist together.

         Love and exhaustion can sit in the same space.

And to those walking beside us trying, in all the ways you know how; it matters more than you will ever fully see.

We may not always have the words.

We may not always show it.

But we carry you with us, too.