Grief, Rebirth, and the Woman I Became When Life Refused To Go Easy

Grief, Rebirth, and the Woman I Became When Life Refused To Go Easy Life doesn’t always crack — sometimes it shatters.
Not in a dramatic, movie-scene way.
More like: one day you’re living inside a version of reality you understand…
and then suddenly, you’re standing in the ruins of the life you used to know.

People love to talk about grief like it’s a sad chapter.
But grief isn’t a chapter.
It’s a whole new book you never wanted to write.

Grief is the moment the old version of you dies,
and the new version has to learn how to walk again.

The First Time Life Broke My Heart

My daughter became ill after an immunization in 2005, when she was just five months old.
Doctors told me she had a five-year life expectancy.
Five years.
A countdown no parent should ever hear.

I tried to prepare myself.
I told myself I’d be ready.
But nothing prepares you for waking up with a clock ticking in the back of your mind,
counting down the moments you’ll never get back.

Then in 2008, my son Marcus was born —
and he passed away at only five weeks old.

Losing him dragged me into a darkness so deep I didn’t know how to breathe inside it.
But the world around me stayed silent.
People avoided the subject like my grief might burn them alive if they touched it.

So I buried it.
I caged it.
I carried it in silence because nobody wanted to hear it.

The Loss That Cracked the Foundation

In 2011, the day I had feared since 2005 arrived.
My daughter Aulburn passed away.

It didn’t feel like losing a child.
It felt like losing gravity.
My entire universe collapsed inward,
and suddenly breathing wasn’t something I knew how to do —
it was something I had to force.

And still, I kept going.
Not out of strength.
Out of survival.

The Loss That Forced My Awakening

Fast-forward to 2023.
I was two years clean, rebuilding my life, holding myself steady,
finally standing in my own light again.

Then my firstborn — my son Donivan, 28 years old — relapsed.
And he died.

This loss didn’t just knock the wind out of me.
It split my soul.
It forced me to face every shadow I had been keeping hidden.
But something wild happened inside that breaking:
I woke up.

Not healed.
Not “better.”
Just awake.

I started listening to Abraham Hicks —
not because I wanted soft words,
but because I was starving for a new way to understand life and death.

And something shifted.

I stopped feeling only the pain of losing them
and started feeling the presence of still being connected to them.

I stopped drowning in the “why”
and started rising in the “’til we see each other again.”

That was the moment grief stopped being a wound
and became a doorway.

 

Learning to Exist in a Life That Will Never Be the Same

Grief isn’t just losing someone.
It’s losing the version of yourself who existed before the loss.

And yet — even with everything life took from me —
I am not empty.

I realized something most people don’t understand until tragedy tears them open:

You don’t “move on”…
you move forward with them woven into your bones.

I have three angels with me.
Every minute.
Every hour.
Every day.

I feel them in the moments the universe winks —
in signs, numbers, synchronicities that show up so specific
it feels like fingerprints from the other side.

I’m not alone.
I never was.

The Soft Part of Me Wrote a Book. The Strong Part of Me Made Grief My Bitch.”

There was a time when grief owned me.
It dictated my mornings, my nights, my breath, my identity. Losing a child breaks you in places nobody sees, and it teaches you a language nobody wants to learn.

That’s why I wrote my book Tears in Heaven — not because I had answers, but because I needed somewhere to put the kind of pain that eats through bone. It’s the soft part of me, the part that still whispers to my babies on the other side. It’s for every parent who’s ever screamed into a pillow and still walked into the next day.

And then there’s the other part of me — the fighter, the survivor, the woman who finally said, “I’m making grief my bitch.”
Not because it stopped hurting.
Not because I “moved on.”
But because I decided grief wasn’t going to drag me behind it anymore. I was going to stand up, shake, breathe, and use every ounce of pain as fuel.

So this is the truth: I honor my grief, but I don’t bow to it.
My book holds my tears.
My life holds my power.

 

 

The New Life After the Ashes

Here’s the raw truth:
My life will never go back to how it was.
And I don’t want it to.

Grief didn’t destroy me —
it stripped away everything I wasn’t.

I stopped dimming myself for people who couldn’t handle my truth.
I stopped apologizing for my strength.
I stopped letting the world tell me how I should heal.

I am not the woman I used to be.
I’m the woman who rose.

Not in spite of the losses —
but because of them.

Grief taught me to see life differently.
It taught me to love deeper.
It taught me to cherish what’s real and release what was never mine.

My reality will never be the same.
But it can still be beautiful.
It can still be powerful.
It can still be good.

If you're walking this path too, I hope my book brings you the warmth and understanding you deserved from the world. And if you're in your warrior era like me, then welcome — this is where we take our lives back from grief.

If You’re Carrying Grief Too

You are not here to stay stuck in the wreckage.
You’re here to walk forward with a soul that’s been tempered by fire.
You’re here to rewrite your life in a world that didn’t play fair.

And the love you lost?
It didn’t leave.
It transformed.

You haven’t been abandoned.
You’ve been guided.

This is not the end of your story.
This is the chapter where you become the version of yourself
you were always meant to be —
the version forged by truth, loss, resilience, and unbreakable love.