06/14/2026
I dressed up for church today.
That might not seem like a big deal, but if I’m honest, I don’t do it much anymore.
Not because I don’t like dresses. Not because I don’t care what I look like. Somewhere along the way, after loss, those things just stopped feeling important.
Timmy loved me in leggings, messy hair, no makeup, and an oversized t-shirt. He never needed me dressed up to think I was beautiful. But he also never missed an opportunity to tell me when I was.
He noticed. He always noticed. And when you’ve had someone love you like that, losing them changes things.
People think grief is just missing someone. It’s not. It’s waking up one day and realizing there was no closure. No final chapter. One day your story was being written, and the next it stopped. Mid sentence. Mid story. Mid us.
It’s standing in a life you never would have chosen and trying to figure out how to carry both things at once. The person you’ve become and the price you paid to become them.
It’s realizing your whole world ended, but somehow everyone else’s kept going. The bills still need to be paid. Groceries still need to be bought. Conversations still need to be had. You’re expected to keep functioning while carrying a weight nobody else can see.
The hardest part for me hasn’t been the tears. It’s how grief rewired me. Losing Leland. Losing Timmy. It made me aware of how quickly we can lose the people we love.
Now I hug tighter. I check to make sure people made it home safely. If someone I love takes too long to reply, my mind immediately goes somewhere it shouldn’t.
My heart is constantly bracing for the next phone call, the next goodbye, the next thing I’m not sure I could survive. It’s exhausting. It’s like part of me is always scanning the horizon for loss. Always waiting for something else to be taken.
And before anyone mistakes that for a lack of faith, it isn’t. I trust God completely. I know He’s sovereign. I know He’s good. I know every one of our days is written before a single one of them comes to be.
This isn’t fear that God will fail me. It’s the reality of having loved deeply and lost deeply. It’s the understanding that life is fragile and tomorrow is never promised. The difference now is that when those thoughts come, I don’t carry them alone.
I give them back to God. Over and over again. Because I’ve learned that while I can’t control what happens tomorrow, I can trust the One who already stands there waiting for me. I don’t take a single moment for granted.
Grief changed my tone. My eyes. My rhythm. My reactions. The way I love. The way I see people. The way I forgive. The way I worry. The way I trust. The way I walk through this world. I may look like the same person. But I’m not. And I never will be.
Every morning Timmy is still my first thought. Without fail. I’ve stopped fighting that. It’s just where he lives now. For a long time I kept waiting for the day it would hurt less. Now I know grief isn’t something you get over. It’s something you learn to carry. The love never leaves, so the grief doesn’t either.
The irony is that healing didn’t happen when I tried to hold it all together. Healing happened when I stopped pretending I was okay. When I sat in the mess. The anger. The sorrow. The exhaustion. The missing.
And let it be what it was. Proof that I loved. Proof that I lost. Proof that I’m still here. Because if there’s one thing I know, it’s this:
Timmy was worth every hard day. Every 2 a.m. Every tear. Every nightmare. Every broken piece. Every bit of grief that came from loving him. He was worth all of it.
Maybe one day I’ll have a reason to dress up again. Maybe one day there will be someone waiting to tell me I look beautiful. But for now, when I put on a dress, it reminds me of him.
It reminds me of the man who never missed an opportunity to make sure I knew I was loved, wanted, and seen.
So today I put on the dress because I’m still here. Still standing. Still learning how to live in a life I didn’t choose. Still carrying a love that death couldn’t take. And still choosing, every single day, to move forward.
Not moving on. Moving forward.
