The Kind of Loss That Has No Ending

There are words for losing people.

Widow.

Orphan.

Language tries to make sense of grief,

to give it a place to sit, a name you can call it so maybe it feels contained.

But there is no word for losing a child.

Especially not like this.

Because this isn't just loss.

Loss has edges.

It has a moment-a line where before

becomes after.

You can point to it, even if it breaks you.

But this?

This is something else entirely.

My daughter is gone.

And I don't know why.

I don't know how.

I don't know what her last moments looked like.

I don't know if she was scared, if she was alone, if she called out for someone who couldn't reach her.

I don't know.

And that not knowing...it doesn't just hurt. It consumes.

Grief, people think, is about missing someone. And it is.

It's in the quiet spaces where her voice should be. In the moments where something happens and your first instinct is to tell her...and then it hits you all over again that you can't.

It's in the memories that play on a loop-her laugh, her face, the way she existed so fully in this world.

But this kind of grief comes with something else attached to it.

Questions.

Relentless, unforgiving questions that have no answers.

You live in a constant state of what if.

What if I had done something different?

What if I had been there?

What if I missed something, didn't see something, didn't say something I should have said?

Your mind becomes a place you can't escape from.

It rewinds.

Replays.

Rebuilds scenarios that don't change the outcome-but you run them anyway.

Because doing nothing feels worse.

There's guilt too. Heavy. Unshakable.

The kind that doesn't care about logic or reason.

Because somewhere deep inside, there's a voice that says:

You were her mother. You were supposed to protect her.

And it doesn't matter what the truth is-that voice doesn't let go.

People say time helps. That it softens things.

That eventually, you learn how to carry it.

Maybe that's true for some kinds of loss.

But this?

This doesn't soften.

You just learn how to exist around it.

There's no closure here.

No neat ending. No explanation that ties it all together and let's you breathe a little easier.

Just a hole where she should be.

A life that keeps moving forward when a part of you is still standing still, waiting for answers that may never come.

And yet...you wake up.

You keep going. Not because you've healed. Not because it's easier.

But because somehow, even in the middle of devastation, life demands it.

I carry her with me. In everything.

In the quiet. In the chaos. In the moments that feel too heavy to hold.

She is still here-in memory, in love, in the pieces of me that will never be the same.

But the truth is...

There will always be a part of me searching. Wondering. Asking questions into a silence that doesn't answer back.

This isn't a story about moving on. It's a story about learning how to live with a loss that never really lets you go.