Moving Forward After Loss

Moving forward after loss. I’m not even sure that’s a real thing.

That’s the phrase everyone uses, and for a long time I just accepted it without really thinking about what it meant. Moving forward implies that you get somewhere new, somewhere past the loss, somewhere it doesn’t reach you anymore. But that has not been my experience, and if I’m being honest with you, I don’t think it’s anyone’s experience. The loss doesn’t stay behind you. It comes along.

What Moving Forward Actually Means

The loss never goes away, but it can feel different day to day. Some days you barely notice the weight of it, and other days it feels just as heavy as it did in the very beginning.

Grief is sharp in the beginning…and for a long time. It catches you off guard in the middle of an ordinary afternoon and knocks the breath right out of you. Over time, that sharpness softens into something quieter, more like a steady ache underneath everything else you’re doing. It doesn’t disappear. It just learns to sit a little further back, so you can function and live and even laugh again, while it stays there in the background, reminding you it hasn’t gone anywhere.

So if moving forward means leaving the loss behind, then no, I don’t think that’s possible. But I don’t think that’s actually what we’re looking for either, even when we use that phrase. I think what we’re really asking is whether it’s possible to build a life again, a full one, with the loss still woven into it. And to that question, I can tell you with complete honesty that the answer is yes. It’s just going to look different than you expect, and it’s going to come with hard days even after the moving starts.

Where My Moving Forward Began

For me, the way forward came through something I never saw coming.

After I lost my mom, and three weeks later my dog Molly, I had all this love and sadness that built up and transformed into energy some days and exhasution others. People talk about grief like it only takes something away from you, but for me it also left behind this strange, restless kind of energy. All I know is that it felt like adrenaline or some kind of anxious urgency, if that makes any sense.

I remember listening to Mel Robbins talk about letting other people live their own lives, and then turning that same grace toward yourself. Let them. Let you. Something about hearing that at exactly the right moment gave me permission I didn’t know I needed. I thought about my mom, and what she would want for me if she could see me drowning in all that sadness. I thought about Molly, who would have been sitting beside me no matter what. So I decided to go for it. I started this blog because I needed somewhere to put everything I was carrying and honor them at the same time.

I wrote about that decision in more detail in a post called Turning Sadness Into Something Beautiful, if you want to read the full story of how that moment unfolded.

Why Diving In Helped Me Move With It

Diving into this blog became my version of moving forward. I didn’t leave my mom or Molly behind to do it. If anything, they were the reason I had the courage to try. I poured myself into learning something completely new, into writing honestly even when it was uncomfortable, and into building something that was mine, something I hoped could grow into more over time. None of that erased the grief. It just gave the grief somewhere productive to live, instead of just sitting heavy in my chest.

I think that’s closer to what moving forward actually means. It’s not that you’re leaving the loss behind, but rather finding the thing that lets you carry it and still keep walking.

Finding Your Moment to Jump In

When I was a kid, we used to play that jump rope game where two people hold either end of a long rope and swing it, and you have to watch and wait for the right moment to run in. You couldn’t just sprint in whenever you felt like it. You had to watch the rhythm, feel the timing, and trust yourself to know when your moment had come.

Moving forward after loss has felt a lot like that to me. You don’t get pushed in before you’re ready, and you shouldn’t force yourself in before you are either. You watch, you wait, and at some point, something shifts and you just know it’s time to jump.

It Doesn’t Mean Every Day Is Easy

I want to be honest with you about something else, too. Once you find your version of moving forward, it doesn’t mean every day gets easy. There are still days when the grief gets hit hard again, even years later, even after you’ve built something good. That just means you’re human, and you loved someone enough that losing them still matters.

If you’re standing in that in-between place right now, not sure how to move forward and not even sure that phrase makes sense to you either, I want you to know that I understand and you’re not alone. You’re just waiting for your moment, the same way I had to wait for mine.

A Free Guide for This Exact Season

If this is where you are right now, I wrote something for exactly this season. It’s a free guide called When A Season Ends, and it’s meant for women who are standing in that quiet stretch between what was and what’s next. You can grab it right here.

One Small Step Forward

When you’re ready for one small step forward, just one thing that makes today feel like it counted, I built something simple for that too. It’s called Your Plan for Today, and you can find it right here.