Leaving Time

There’s a quiet, complicated truth about grief that no one really prepares you for: it doesn’t just live in the moment you lose someone. It follows you forward. It waits patiently in the future, tucked inside the milestones you haven’t reached yet.

And then one day, you reach them anyway.

That, I think, is the hardest part.

Because life doesn’t stop when theirs does. It keeps unfolding—birthdays, weddings, new homes, new dreams—and you’re expected to step into each of those moments carrying both joy and absence at the same time. The world calls it “moving on,” but it never feels that simple. It feels more like learning how to hold two realities in the same breath: this is beautiful and this is incomplete.

It’s been almost thirteen years since I lost my mom. Thirteen years of becoming someone she never got to meet. I’ve walked through childbirth, stood at my wedding, built pieces of my life, chased dreams, and crossed thresholds she should have been standing beside me for.

Every milestone has had this invisible outline of her—like a space that should have been filled, but never is.

And somehow, your mind knows it.

Grief changes the way your consciousness experiences these moments. It doesn’t erase the joy—it deepens it, sharpens it—but it also adds this echo. A quiet awareness that someone essential is missing. You can be smiling, laughing, celebrating… and still feel that soft ache underneath it all. Not overwhelming, not always loud—but always there.

I’ve learned to live with that.

But this milestone… this one feels different.

This pregnancy. This baby.

Because this is the first time I’m bringing a child into a world where not only my mom is gone—but my grandfather, too. And that realization has settled into me in a way I didn’t expect.

It stings in a deeper place.

I’ve never had a child in a world without him in it.

This baby won’t meet him. Won’t sit beside him. Won’t hear his voice or feel his presence the way my other children did. There will be no fishing trips with him—no quiet mornings by the water, no patient hands showing them how to cast a line.

And that’s what breaks me a little.

Because he loved them so much. He chose to stay, in every way he could. I remember how determined he was—how he refused to let his body win before he had one more moment. How he made sure he took my youngest, Arwyn, fishing. Even when it wasn’t easy. Even when it took everything in him. He had us help him down to the lake just so he could sit there with her, just so that memory would exist.

That kind of love doesn’t disappear.

But it leaves behind an absence that echoes.

I’ve put the fishing poles in my truck—his truck—more times than I can count. I’ve loaded them up, told myself this is the day, and then… I don’t go. It’s been almost two years now. Two years of not fishing, because something about it feels wrong. Like stepping into a moment that was never meant to exist without him.

Grief does that. It attaches itself to places, to rituals, to the smallest details—and suddenly something simple becomes sacred, untouchable.

But here’s the truth I’m starting to understand:

The milestones don’t stop coming.

And neither does the love they left behind.

This year, I have to fish.

Not because it won’t hurt—but because it will.

Because those moments weren’t just his—they were meant to continue. They were meant to be passed down, carried forward, lived again in new hands and new laughter. My kids deserve that. This baby deserves that. And maybe, in a way, he deserves that too.

Grief tells us that moving forward means leaving someone behind.

But love tells us something different.

It tells us we bring them with us.

In the way we show up. In the things we teach. In the traditions we refuse to let die. In the quiet moments where we feel them, even when they’re no longer physically here.

So I will fish.

And I will have this baby.

And I will teach them how to hold a rod, how to watch the water, how to be patient in the silence. I will tell them about the man whose truck we drive, whose love still lives in these small, ordinary things.

And maybe it won’t feel right at first.

Maybe it will feel heavy, and tender, and a little bit broken.

But maybe that’s what healing actually looks like—not the absence of grief, but the willingness to keep living alongside it.

Because milestones aren’t just reminders of who we’ve lost.

They’re also proof of everything that continues.

And somehow, in the middle of all that continuation…

Love remains.