There are moments in life that split everything into “before” and “after.” Losing my sister in 2020 was that moment for me. She wasn’t just my sibling, she was my best friend, my safe place, the one person who truly understood me in a way no one else ever has. I come from a big family, but she was the one I leaned on, the one I laughed with, the one I trusted with the deepest parts of myself. When she died, it felt like the world went silent. Everything familiar suddenly felt foreign.
The day everything broke
COVID took her so quickly and so cruelly that my mind still struggles to make sense of it. One day we were talking, and the next I was staring at her through a phone screen, trying to say goodbye when all I wanted was to hold her hand. That moment still lives in me.
I couldn’t hold her hand. I had to say goodbye through a phone screen, something no one should ever have to do. That moment shattered me. It broke something inside me that I didn’t know could break.
And after she was gone, I didn’t know how to exist in a world where she wasn’t. I didn’t know how to breathe without her voice grounding me. I didn’t know how to move forward when the person who always walked beside me was suddenly gone.
In the months that followed, I didn’t fall apart in the way you would expect. Instead, I went into survival mode. I took care of everyone else, my family, their heartbreak, their confusion, their pain, because it felt easier than facing my own. I pushed my own grief so far down that it swallowed me from the inside out. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t breathe. I didn’t feel. I didn’t take care of myself. I just kept going because stopping meant feeling and feeling meant drowning. It meant facing the truth, and the truth was unbearable.
And the truth is, I did drown for a long time.
Grief didn’t just take my sister. It took pieces of my family, too. Bonds broke. Sides were taken. The people who should have held each other together fell apart instead. It was messy and painful and unfair. I was grieving her, grieving the family I thought I had, grieving the version of myself that existed before everything changed.
Because the one person I needed — the one who had always been there — was gone.
For years, I carried all of that alone. Still pretending in my mind that I was still the person I was when she was alive.
So many questions haunted me
For a long time, I lived in a fog of “why.”
Why her?
Why someone so good, so kind, so pure-hearted?
Why did she have to leave when she was the one who deserved the longest, happiest life?
I didn’t understand.
I blamed myself.
I wondered if I had done something wrong, if somehow, I had brought this pain onto myself. Grief twists your mind in ways you don’t expect. It makes you question everything, including your own worth.
It wasn’t until last year that I finally started to come up for air. Healing didn’t arrive in some big, dramatic moment. It came quietly in small breaths, in tiny steps, in the slow realization that I couldn’t keep abandoning myself. I had to learn how to sit with my grief instead of running from it. I had to learn how to take care of myself the way I took care of everyone else.
One day, my Bible app sent me a daily inspiration, a verse from Isaiah 57:1–2. I won’t quote it fully here, but the message was about good people being taken from this world to be spared from deeper suffering.
Reading that was the first time I could breathe again.
The first time anything made even a little bit of sense.
The first time I felt something other than guilt or confusion.
It didn’t take the pain away, but it softened the edges just enough for me to stand up again. That moment became the beginning of my healing slow, quiet, imperfect, but real.
I’m still navigating how to live without her. I’m still learning how to carry this grief without letting it consume me. Some days I handle it better. Some days I don’t. But I’m no longer drowning the way I once was.
This blog grew out of that unbearable pain — the kind that forces you to rebuild from the inside out. Writing became the only place where I could be honest about what I was carrying. It became a way to make sense of the heartbreak, the loneliness, the anger, the love, and the pieces of her that still live in me.
A way to honor her, to honor my healing, and to honor the version of me who survived the darkest season of my life.
I’m not healed. I don’t think grief ever fully leaves us. It changes shape. It softens. It teaches us how to grow around it. I’m still learning how to live with this loss, how to move through the world without the person who meant everything to me. But I’m also learning that healing doesn’t mean forgetting, it means finding ways to carry love and pain together.
If you’re walking through your own loss, I hope my story reminds you that you’re not alone. You’re allowed to take your time. Grief changes us, but it doesn’t have to end us. We can rewrite our lives, even after the deepest heartbreak. You’re allowed to fall apart and rebuild. You’re allowed to rewrite your life as many times as you need.
I’m still rewriting mine.
And I’m grateful you’re here with me.
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