Coming Home to Ourselves

This reflection is a companion to last year's post about grief and finding light in darkness.

Today marks thirty-five years since my dad died. A lifetime, really - and yet the weight of it lands as if it were yesterday. It's strange to think I've now surpassed the age he reached. He had just turned 58.

Time does odd things with grief. The sharp edges soften, but the shape remains. And on days like today, I find myself thinking not just about loss, but about what happens to us when loss arrives - how we leave ourselves in order to survive, and the long journey of finding our way back home.

Because that's what trauma does, isn't it? Whether it arrives in one catastrophic moment or accumulates through years of carrying too much - it teaches us how to leave. How to disconnect from the unbearable. How to keep moving when staying present would break us.

Our bodies are wise that way. They know when to step back, when to create distance, when to protect us from what we're not yet ready to feel. It's survival. It works.

But somewhere along the way, we forget we were meant to come back.

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I remember the phone call. My mom's voice on the other end. I remember shouting "NOOO" - but it was like I was in a tunnel, hearing something happening elsewhere, to someone else. My coworkers ran to my office door, but I wasn't really there anymore. Some part of me had already left.

What follows are fragments - pieces I can recall but not quite feel, like photographs from someone else's life: Coworkers gently pushing me out the door when I thought I'd just stay and finish the workday, as if normalcy could be maintained through routine. My dear friend and coworker driving me home, staying with me so I wouldn't be alone. My roommate somehow finding out and rushing back to be with me. I have no memory of what was said or left unsaid during those first painful hours.

Then boarding a plane - but how did I get there? How did I get the ticket that a kind coworker had somehow bought for me? And my brother appearing on that final leg of the journey, as if by magic - how did we manage to coordinate our flights? We sat in near silence for that hour home, holding hands, both of us thinking the same thing: "Now what?"

And then the kitchen. The three of us - my brother, my mom, and me - sitting in stunned silence. The question hung in the air, unspoken but deafening: How do we move forward from here?

I share these fragments not because they're remarkable, but because they're not. This is what leaving looks like. The gaps. The blank spaces. The sense of watching your life happen to someone else. Your body keeps moving through the motions while you - the essential you - steps back into some safer, quieter place.

It's protective. And for a while, it's necessary.

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I returned to what we call "normal life" - back to work, back to routines - but nothing felt normal. That's what I wanted most: to feel normal again. To find my way back to the person I'd been before.

One day, a few weeks after returning, I ran into a coworker who had also lost a parent recently. I asked her when the pain would go away.

She looked at me with such kindness and said simply: "It doesn't. It just quiets down."

That truth was a gift, though I didn't recognize it at the time. She wasn't trying to fix me or comfort me with false promises of healing. She wasn't offering a timeline or a roadmap back to who I used to be. She was telling me something essential: You're not going back. There's a new you now. And that's okay.

That is connection - to ourselves. That's what real resilience looks like - not bouncing back to your old shape, but allowing yourself to be changed. Allowing the loss to reshape you. Making room for this new version of yourself who carries both the grief and the love, who knows what it means to survive something unbearable.

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Several months later, my friend and I were driving to work like any other day. The radio played, like it always did. I was staring out the window, lost in whatever quiet space I occupied in those days - present but not really present, there but not quite there.

At the end of a song, she said gently: "That's the first time you've let that song play all the way through."

I turned to her, confused. What song? I hadn't even been listening.

"Tears in Heaven," she said. Eric Clapton's song about seeing his recently departed child when he gets to heaven someday. "You always change the station when it comes on."

I knew exactly what she was talking about. The references to heaven, to seeing our beloveds again someday - they hadn't brought me comfort. They made me sadder. Why couldn't I see my person now? The reminder must have been too much, my hand reaching automatically for the dial every time, protecting me from pain I wasn't ready to feel. I had no idea I'd been routinely turning it off.

She did.

She never told me what I should do. She never pushed me to face things I wasn't ready for. She simply sat with me, day after day, in whatever state I was in. She witnessed. And it was in that moment - being seen, being truly known - that something shifted. I could finally start opening up and talking about my sadness.

That is connection - between two friends. She wasn't trying to fix me or tell me how to grieve or how long it should take. She was simply someone being present, paying attention, noticing when I was ready to come back - even before I knew it myself.

That's what helps us find our way home: being witnessed in our leaving, and being gently called back when we're ready to return.

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Over the years, I've witnessed this same cycle of loss and reconnection play out countless times - within myself as well as in the experiences of others. It's not the story that's unique to any one person - it's our individual frame, our particular experience. When we can recognize the pieces that are shared, that's when we can start to reach out in ways that support others. Not just our close friends, but in seeing it through the eyes and experiences of another - a stranger in the grocery store who looks lost in that familiar tunnel, a colleague going through the motions, someone in our community carrying grief we can't see but somehow sense.

That is connection - to something larger than ourselves. The recognition that we're part of an endless web of humans who have left themselves and found their way home again. That our individual pain connects us to every person who has ever survived what they thought would break them.

The Missing Link

I share this story - still feeling pieces of that original weight after all these years - because I wonder how many of us are living in that tunnel. Not from death necessarily, but from the accumulated weight of trying times. From trauma large and small. From being the one everyone relies on until we've forgotten how to come home to ourselves.

Maybe you've been there too. That sense of going through the motions while the real you has stepped back somewhere safe. The gaps in memory. The feeling of watching your life happen to someone else. The survival mode that somehow became your permanent address.

Our bodies know how to protect us. They know when to create distance, when to check out, when to keep us moving even when staying present would break us. It's wisdom. It works. It saves us.

But we're not meant to stay there.

Coming Home

Here's what I've learned about finding our way back:

We need connection to ourselves - the willingness to be changed rather than trying to bounce back to who we were. The courage to meet this new version of ourselves with compassion instead of judgment.

We need connection to others - those rare witnesses who sit with us without trying to fix us. Who notice when we're ready to come back, even before we know it ourselves. Who remind us we're not alone in this very human experience of losing ourselves and finding our way home again.

And we need connection to something larger - the recognition that this pattern of leaving and returning is as old as humanity itself. That loss and grief and healing are part of the shared human experience. That what we're feeling isn't abnormal or broken, but deeply, achingly human. And recognizing that time will pass and the pain quiets down but never fully leaves, and somehow that's both heartbreaking and beautiful.

These three connections - to ourselves, to others, to the larger web of being human - these are what help us find our way back. Not all at once. Not in a straight line. But gradually, gently, one moment of presence at a time.

Today, thirty-five years after I left my old self in that office, I can feel it all - the loss, the love, the changed shape of who I became. The pain has quieted down, just like my coworker promised. But it's still here, woven into who I am now.

And I'm grateful for that. Because it means I came back. I found my way home.

If you're in that tunnel right now - if you've been going through the motions while some essential part of you waits somewhere safer - I want you to know: You're not broken. You're protected. And when you're ready, there are witnesses waiting to help you find your way back.

But I also want to ask: Do you need to stay there any longer? Or are you ready to step back into the world, to play large again, to reconnect with the part of you that's been waiting patiently to come home?

Connection is the missing link. Connection to yourself. Connection to others. Connection to the shared human experience of surviving what we thought would break us.

That's how we come home.

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