You Are Not Defined
By What You've Lost

I want to tell you about my dad first.

He was my rock.

Not in the way people say that casually — not just a good father, not just a reliable man. He was the person I called. Every Saturday morning without fail I picked up the phone and called him. It was our thing — my weekly anchor, the call that reminded me no matter where I was in the world, I had someone who knew me.

When I moved away from Iowa — chasing life, seeing the world, doing things on my own — he was the constant. The voice that reminded me who I was when everything else felt uncertain.

And then the boat accident happened. Father's Day weekend, 2003. And the Saturday morning calls stopped forever.

I didn't just lose my dad that day.

I lost the one person who truly knew me.

The Loneliness Nobody Talks About

Here is something people don't tell you about grief — especially when you're young and mobile and living far from home:

You can be completely alone in it.

I had moved around. Different cities, different seasons of life. I had friends at church, at work, at the gym — good people, kind people. But when I moved, we lost touch. There was no social media to hold us together. No texting the way we have it now. You moved and people simply faded.

So when my dad died I was in my early thirties, living away from home, with no best friend to call. No one who knew my whole heart.

I carried that grief mostly alone.

And it changed me in ways I am still understanding.

The Friend I Had Been Waiting For

It wasn't until I moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma that I finally found her.

Starr.

She was a few years younger than me, but we became close fast. The kind of close that happens when two people recognize something in each other — a realness, a depth, a willingness to go below the surface and stay there.

We talked. We texted. We shared everything. She was the friend I had been missing for years — the one who stayed, the one who showed up, the one who knew me.

She was a personal trainer. A marathon runner. A snowboarder. She loved the beach. She had a heart bigger than life and one of those spirits that made everyone in the room feel like they mattered.

She was the kind of friend everyone loved. And she was mine.

And then she got sick.

Watching Someone You Love Disappear

It started with Raynaud's syndrome around the time I got married in 2005. But it became something far worse.

Scleroderma. Systemic diffuse scleroderma — the most aggressive kind. A disease that hardens the body from the outside in, slowly taking the organs, slowly taking everything. It is relentless and it is cruel and it does not negotiate.

Starr came to live with me in Colorado for a year.

And I watched her body die right in front of me.

She was scared. Of course she was scared. She was a young woman who had wanted to move to the beach, get married, have children, be a missionary — whatever the Lord had for her. She had a whole life waiting. And this disease was stealing it piece by piece.

We cried. We prayed. We cried some more.

Eventually she needed to go home to North Carolina. She could no longer care for herself and she hated — truly hated — that this was the option in front of her. She wanted something different. Something more. But her body had made the choice for her.

I made a trip to see her in July 2012. I knew things were bad. She was frail. I went to a doctor's appointment with her and watched her search the doctor's face for any answer that could heal her. Any hope. Any door that wasn't closing.

There wasn't one.

Three weeks later — on August 6th, my son's fifth birthday — Starr went home.

The same day I was celebrating the gift of my little boy's life, I was grieving the loss of my best friend. Joy and grief colliding in the same breath. That is grief. That is the complexity of it. That is how it finds you — in the most unexpected, most tender moments.

What Loss After Loss After Loss Does to a Person

Losing my dad broke something open in me.

But losing Starr — and then Nicole, and Linda, and Trudi, one after another in my late thirties and early forties — broke me differently.

It changed me.

I was tired of crying. Tired of sitting alone in my sadness. Tired of losing people I loved and having nowhere to put the grief, no one who truly understood, no community built to hold the kind of loss I was carrying.

I was broken.

And broken is where I stayed for a long time.

But I knew I couldn't go on sitting alone in my own sadness. I couldn't get them back. Not one of them. And I had to decide what to do with that.

I must have a story to share. That was the conviction that kept rising up inside me even in the darkest moments. I must have a story to share.

And Then — Something Shifted

I don't know exactly when it happened. Not a single moment. More like a slow turning — like the earth moving toward the sun so gradually you don't notice until suddenly there is light.

I went through the brokenness. I didn't go around it. I didn't skip it. I sat inside it, cried inside it, prayed inside it, and kept going anyway.

And on the other side I found something I hadn't expected.

Myself.

Not the same version of myself. A different one. Deeper. Quieter. More certain.

Happy with the choices I make. Blessed — truly, deeply blessed — to have loved so much, learned so much, and to know what it is to really live.

In this big world I now feel blessed to have loved, learned, and know what it is to really live.

What I Want You To Know

You are not defined by what you've lost.

Not by the people. Not by the identity that grief stripped away. Not by the version of yourself that existed before the loss and feels impossibly far away now.

You are being shaped by it.

Every loss. Every graveside. Every Saturday morning call that will never come again. Every friend who left too soon. Every prayer that felt unanswered. Every moment you sat across from someone you loved and felt the unbearable helplessness of watching them suffer.

All of it is forming something in you.

A story. A purpose. A capacity for love and compassion and understanding that most people never develop.

People are hurting out there. They are wanting answers. Wanting connection. Wanting someone who truly gets it — not from a distance, not from a textbook, but from the inside of the same grief they are carrying.

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