“Our sadness and wounds are only healed when touched with compassion.” ~Jack Cornfield
Her absence exhale at the tranquility of the early morning, moments between tasks, and evening tranquility. I was good at moving. When you’re busy. With the production. But sometimes, especially recently, quiet people catch me – and I fall.
Sadness is not necessarily a roar. Sometimes it’s a whisper, and you barely hear until it grows into a wind that bends your bones.
It’s been almost three years since my daughter passed away. People told me time would help. Your first holiday, your first birthday without her will be the most difficult. And maybe that was true.
But what prepared me was how her absence would reflect in the years that followed. How sadness evolves, shifts shape, and sometimes becomes heavy. How her loss reveals old wounds. Before her birth. The wound goes back to a little girl who never felt safe at all.
I would like to say I have been healing for the past few years. meditation. Journaling. growth. And I did -. Inconsistent. I do what healthy and mindful people should do as a checkmark, but I do it without feeling much. I went through the movement, hoping that healing somehow would catch up.
Instead, what I found was a voice I hadn’t listened to in years. My inner child is waiting in anger. The truth is, I began to lose contact with her long ago, while the whirlwind pace of this year pulled me apart.
She waited quietly at first. But, ignoring her for long enough, she began to stir. Her protest was not loud. It was physical – tense shoulders, shallow breathing, scattered thoughts, restless sleep. A kind of uneasy amputation that I kept trying to “fix” by doing more.
I filled my days with obligation and outward energy.
But the pain never passed.
It just got smarter – in my body, in my distracted mind, in the invisible wall between me and the world.
Until the day I finally stopped. I don’t know if I’m too tired to keep running, or if my sadness finally gave way with me. However, I paused long enough to draw a card from my self-healing oracle deck. Read:
“Listen to me and know.”
I stared at the words and cried.
This was her. The little girl inside me. Someone who worked hard, played and perfected for years. Someone who wasn’t sure she was adorable unless she got it. Someone who had not only my pain, but my joy. My kindness. My creativity. My curiosity.
She never left. She was just waiting – watching, hurting, hoping I remember.
For a long time, I thought healing meant correction. erase. It’s “better” so there’s no need to feel any pain anymore.
But she reminded me that healing isn’t about getting rid of the pain, but about going back to herself.
I’m still learning how to stay with her. I don’t always know what she needs. But I’m listening now.
Sometimes she just wants to color or lie down on the grass. Sometimes she wants to cry. Sometimes she wants pancakes for dinner. And sometimes she wants nothing but being told she is safe. I’ll see her. Never leave again.
These little normal behaviors feel like repetition. I’m still learning how to make myself a mother, even though I continue to grieve my daughter. That’s strange. I want to give her and be careful about my part, as I once wanted to be equally small, soft and troublesome.
I talked a lot about my daughter’s loss. The spaces she once filled echo every day. But what lasts is the way she is. She was always who she was at each moment. There is no apology. There is no reduction.
In my own journey of not wanting anything different, I simply let go of my part to be accepted.
Meanwhile, she stood out. The world has brought her special needs. I called her lily.
Her authenticity reminded me of what I had lost to myself. And now authenticity is what my inner child had been waiting for.
Sometimes I wonder if the universe gave me Lily not just to teach her, but to teach her. Maybe our children don’t just inherit from us. We have inherited it from them too.
Her gift, her legacy, was not just love. That was true. A kind of truth that comes from living like you.
Maybe her lesson for me is one that I’m just starting to accept. Being fully herself is the most sacred way I can respect her.
It’s not easy. My adults want a checklist, results, and a clean timeline. But she reminds me: healing is not a destination. That’s a relationship.
It’s a relationship with the past – yes – also relates to the present moment. My part still flinches under pressure. With its softness, I once thought I had to abandon it to survive.
I’m learning that my softness never mattered. What followed was silence when no one responded to it.
She’s the key. The key to my own heart.
It doesn’t always turn into waves.
Sometimes it flickers, breaths, quiet knowing I’m still here, and so are they.
My daughter, in the memories that move my life like the wind. And in my inner child, in the softness I am learning to regain. We all meet in a space where sadness and love hold hands.
Maybe it’s a lesson she’s been screaming for so long. In our own mind, it is, sender, hurt, still beating – erect the key to getting started again.
We cannot make a lost child as mother as we once did.
But perhaps in their absence, we can begin to mother with a small, forgotten part of ourselves. With the same love, the same patience, the same fierce dedication.
Maybe that’s how we honor them. By moving inward rather than moving forward.
About Elizabeth Scandie
Elizabeth Candy is a writer, mother and spiritual seeker. She writes about grief, healing, and the journey back to herself after loss. She believes that we can find our way by listening inwards and loving the forgotten parts of ourselves. Read more about her writing at lifeafterlil.com or follow her on Instagram @lifeafterlil.
