When Grief Takes Your Breath Away
— And How You Find It Again

Today is June 14th.

I know this date the way I know my own heartbeat.

Twenty-three years ago today — Father's Day weekend, 2003 — everything changed. I was 31 years old, single, still dreaming of the life ahead of me. Still finishing. Still hoping. Still calling my dad when I needed someone who truly knew me.

He was my rock.

And then the phone rang.

The Call That Split My Life in Two

I was at work when my brother called.

He had been on the boat. He survived. He was at the hospital — shaken, but alive.

I will never forget his words for as long as I live.

I lost it.

I started screaming. Shaking. Frozen in time — the way grief freezes you in the exact moment it arrives, the way it burns the details of that second into your memory forever. The phone in my hand. The floor beneath my feet. The sound of my own voice making sounds I had never made before.

That is what grief does when it first arrives. It takes your breath away so completely that all that's left is the sound of your own breaking.

A Day That Should Never Have Happened

It was a stormy day off the coast of Oregon.

Many charter companies had cancelled. The water was too rough. The conditions too dangerous. But because it was Father's Day weekend — because there were fathers and sons and husbands on that dock who had waited for this trip — this company decided to go anyway.

The boat was only half a foot above code length. Eleven men lost their lives that day.

Eleven.

My dad was the only one found on the boat. The rest were thrown into the water. Eleven families. Eleven phone calls. Eleven silences that would never fully end.

I was 31 years old. Single. Still becoming. And my father — the man I called when I needed anything, the man who knew me — was gone.

Three Days of Anguish

This was 2003. There was no Facebook. No social media. No way to reach out to a community of people who might understand.

There was just the silence. The phone. The waiting.

For three days I lived in anguish — little sleep, raw grief, the particular agony of knowing your person is gone but not yet being able to say goodbye. His body had to be flown back to Iowa. Three days of waiting for the funeral. Three days of existing in a space between loss and burial that has no name.

I remember walking into the morgue.

I remember seeing his body.

I remember that moment marking something in me — a line drawn in the story of my life. Before. And after.

It was the beginning of funerals. The first of many times I would stand at a graveside, holding the weight of love and loss in my hands, learning slowly what it means to carry both.

What Nobody Tells You About Grief

Nobody tells you that grief is physical.

That it lives in your chest like a weight you cannot put down. That it shows up in your body before your mind has even caught up — the tight throat, the shallow breathing, the exhaustion that no amount of sleep can fix.

Nobody tells you that grief changes your identity.

That one day you are someone's daughter — and then you're not. And the woman who looks back at you in the mirror is someone you don't quite recognize anymore. Someone quieter. Someone heavier. Someone still searching for solid ground.

Nobody tells you about the anxiety that moves in uninvited.

The way grief can make the ordinary feel impossible. The way a phone call, a Father's Day card display in a store, a song on the radio can bring it all rushing back — years, decades later — like it just happened.

Nobody tells you how long it lasts.

How grief doesn't follow a timeline or a checklist. How it comes in waves — sometimes gentle, sometimes devastating — for years. For the rest of your life, really. Because love doesn't end. And grief is just love with nowhere to go.

And Yet. You Are Still Here.

If you are reading this — you are still here.

That matters more than you know.

The fact that you got up this morning, that you found these words, that some part of you is still reaching for something — hope, healing, understanding, connection — that is not nothing. That is everything.

Grief does not mean your life is over. It means you loved deeply. And love — real, fierce, lasting love — always leaves a mark.

How I Learned to Breathe Again

I won't tell you it was easy. It wasn't.

What I will tell you is this — breathing came back slowly. In small moments. In unexpected places.

It came back in my garden — kneeling in the soil on a quiet morning, hands in the earth, something stirring inside me that felt like it might be purpose.

It came back in the words of my best friend Starr, who used to say "The best is yet to come" with such conviction that I held onto those words like a lifeline through every loss that followed.

It came back in faith — in the slow, steady belief that the Lord walks with us through every valley. Even the ones that seem to have no end.

And it came back in purpose — in the quiet, growing conviction that the pain I had carried was not wasted. That it was, in fact, preparing me for something.

What I Want You to Know Today

If grief has taken your breath away — I see you.

If you are in the middle of the silence right now — I see you.

If you have looked in the mirror and not recognized the woman looking back — I see you.

You are not broken. You are not behind. You are not too far gone.

You are grieving. And grieving is one of the most human, most courageous, most love-filled things a person can do.

You are not defined by what you've lost. You are being shaped by it.

And the best — the real best — is still yet to come.

I love you, Dad. Thank you for being my rock. 💜