Life after loss… a new normal I’m slowly learning to live in.
This post feels more vulnerable than most, but I believe there is healing in sharing—because loss is something we will all eventually face, in one way or another.
Recently, my uncle passed after 11 months of fighting an aggressive form of leukemia. Driving back to Charleston after his funeral, I felt this strange full-circle moment—asking myself, Where did this year go? Last September, he was diagnosed. I was preparing to move to Charleston in October, unsure if I should still go. But he told me to go, to keep living, to keep dreaming. He always encouraged me in this way.
Now, here I am, back in the city he urged me to embrace, trying to understand what it means to live after loss.
This experience has marked me in ways I’m only beginning to understand. It’s made me reflect not just on death, but on all the ways loss can show up. Sometimes it’s a person. Other times, it’s the quiet death of a relationship, plan, a dream, or a version of life we thought we’d have. Loss has many names, but it often leaves the same ache.
Grief has made life feel messier than I expected. It disrupts the neat borders we once drew. It blurs what we thought was certain. It’s one thing to witness it in another’s story or watch it on a tv screen, but it’s entirely different when you’re suddenly living it yourself.
So how do we live after loss?
I’m learning that while loss is inevitable, it also carries an invitation;
to see beauty in brokenness,
to widen our perspective,
to live more intentionally than before.
It’s not about “moving on.” It’s about moving differently.
My uncle chose that. He chose to dance in the face of death, not because it was easy, but because love and faith compelled him. His life has marked mine forever, and now I choose to use mine in the ways he no longer can. To say yes more. To travel more. To love more. To remember how fragile life is and how deeply worth living it still is.
So this is where I am: learning to live after loss. Letting it reshape what I cherish. Letting it slow me down for sunsets. Reminding me to pursue the dream. To love deeper. To notice the ordinary. Loss doesn’t have to harden us. It can make us softer; people who feel more, notice more, and carry legacy not just in memory, but in the way we live.
Living after loss is not linear. It’s raw. It’s messy. It’s ever-shifting. But it keeps moving, carrying the lessons of what was left behind. It is not stuffing feelings to “move on,” but it is the process of staying curious on the lessons and letting it affect our lives.
And I believe, even here, there can be beauty.
A deeper becoming.
Not in spite of the pain, but through it.
xoxo, B
blissfullyb 