year 2

learning how to live with loss

Whatever year you are in with grief can feel like the hardest year.

I believe this. And I also believe there is something particular — and particularly unspoken — about Year 2.

Year 1 comes with a strange kind of scaffolding. There is often support wrapped around you: hospice grief programs, check-in calls, casseroles, permission to cancel plans, the collective understanding that you are “in it.” Year 1 is full of firsts, and as brutal as those are, they come with a clear task: get through. Head down. Step after step. One breath, one memory, one unthinkable milestone at a time.

And you do get through. You’re here to tell the tale.

Which is where Year 2 begins.

No one really talks about Year 2. The supports thin out. The world subtly assumes you’re back to normal, or at least functional. The calendar begins repeating itself, but now without the novelty — or the permission — of the firsts. You find yourself facing down the same milestones, except this time you’re doing it largely on your own. And you’re doing it in the midst of your everyday life.

The hallmark of Year 2, at least as I’ve experienced it this past year, is this quiet, devastating realization:

I have to keep living.

Not despite the loss.
But with it.

***

We are nearing the end of our second holiday season without my mom. She died in January 2024, which means this stretch — Thanksgiving through mid-January — is a concentrated corridor of memory and meaning. She carved the turkey. Cookie baking was our thing. Christmas held her in a hundred big and small ways. Her birthday is New Year’s Eve. The anniversary of her death follows shortly after. Six weeks where she was everywhere, and now is nowhere — and somehow still both.

This Thanksgiving surprised me. It was tender and beautiful in ways I didn’t expect. That gave me hope for the weeks to come. I thought, maybe I’m doing okay. Maybe I can just…do this.

And so I tried.

As I typically would, I planned all the things: the cards, the decorations, the lights, more cookies (always more cookies), wrapping early so there would be something under the tree. Few of these plans actually came to pass. Still, I intended to keep the season festive. Light. Moving. As a holiday should go. Right?

There have been lovely moments. And what I hadn’t realized was that beneath them lived an unspoken pressure — the expectation that somehow it could be holiday as usual, if I just tried hard enough.

Last Sunday, everything stopped.

I couldn’t run another errand.
I couldn’t listen to another carol.
I couldn’t buy another gift.
I couldn’t make another plan.

I’ve been intentionally creating spaces for others to slow down, to rest, to be with what’s true. And somewhere along the way, I stopped allowing that for myself. In overwhelm and tears, I put on my noise-canceling headphones, curled up in a chair, and stared out the window. For hours. The silence offered a relief so profound it felt like remembering something I’d forgotten how to do.

What became clear in that stillness was this: I had been on autopilot. Without realizing it, I was acting as if she were still here, assuming everything could be normal and I wouldn’t have to feel the rupture or make any new choices. On some level, I told myself it was kindness to expect the season to hold me in this way. But there was a dissonance that registered inside as pressure. Like unconsciously forcing myself to live in a world that no longer exists.

Ah…right.
Of course it can’t be holiday as usual.

Of course it can’t.

It’s humbling to realize this, especially because this is the work I do. I know how to sit with grief. I know how to offer support, how to name thresholds, how to tend what’s tender. And still, my own grief continues to ask for things no one else can define for me. No roadmap, no well-meaning advice, no shared story can tell me exactly how this loss wants to be lived with — as is the way with all losses.

Grief is intimate that way. It teaches us in a language that can’t be borrowed. However much we learn from one another, we still have to listen ourselves into it — into who we are becoming now.

Year 1 is about surviving. Year 2 is about living. About learning how to live with the loss. About beginning the slow work of culling what stays and what goes. What gets carried forward. What must be set down. How traditions change shape. How something new and more sustainable begins to emerge — unmistakably yours — without erasing what came before.

This is not a clean process. It is uneven and deeply personal. There is grief not only for who we lost, but for the life we can no longer recreate.

However you may be experiencing a Year 2 — recently or long past — know this: there is nothing wrong with you if it feels harder than expected. There is nothing wrong if the way things were stop working. There is nothing wrong if you find yourself asking, quietly or desperately,

How do I live now?

That question isn’t a failure.
It’s the work.

❤️

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If you’d like something gentle to walk with you through the turning of the year, I’ve created a simple ritual guide to support you in tending your own important moments — a spacious companion to help you slow down and reconnect with what matters. It’s called Creating Everyday Rituals of Connection.

✨ You can receive your free ritual guide here ✨

It’s there if it serves. My gift to you.

And as the year winds down, I want to thank you for being here, for your presence, and for the ways you’ve supported this blog through the years. There are some things stirring for 2026 that I think you’ll love. 💖

May the year’s end meet you exactly where you are,
with kindness and care, and a wonder of all things.