Nobody Tells You There’s a Third Option After Loss

“Moving on” never felt right. Here’s what I found instead.

It was August, a few months after my husband Ken died. I’d poured a glass of cabernet and carried it out to the garden he’d tended for years. The angel trumpets were in bloom, their sweet scent lingering around me. Their aroma competed with the way summer evenings smell when you’re simultaneously grateful and gutted.

I was about to read a message Ken had left me—words I didn’t know he spoke. Words I didn’t think were possible to exist.

Our hospice grief counselor, Claire, had visited him every week during his final months. In their last conversations—before she moved back to Los Angeles, before he died—she’d asked if there was anything he wanted her to tell me after he was gone. She’d typed his words directly into her phone so she’d have them exact. She waited until she saw me in person, at a sidewalk café on a warm night a few months after he died, to make sure I was ready to receive them.

Sitting in that garden with his message open on my phone, hands trembling, I read what he’d asked her to share:

I still am.
Together we still be.
We’re still here.
We still exist together.

I read those words aloud, again and again, until they sounded like prayer.

That night, I understood something I hadn’t been able to name before: I wasn’t going to move on from Ken. And I didn’t have to.

The Problem With “Moving On”

From the moment someone we love dies, the world begins quietly—and sometimes not so quietly—encouraging us toward a destination called “over it.” People mean well. They want to see us okay. They offer timelines, stages, and reassurances that things will get back to normal.

But “moving on” has always felt like a betrayal dressed up as progress. It implies leaving something behind. Closing a chapter. Returning to a version of yourself that, honestly, no longer exists.

After Ken died, I tried to perform okay-ness. Four months after he was gone, I went alone to see a movie about a young man with cancer. I posted on social media to prove I was “out in the world.” I walked home convinced I’d had a breakthrough. I hadn’t. I’d just been very convincing.

Grief doesn’t reward performance. It waits until you’re honest.

What “Moving With” Actually Looks Like

“Moving with” is different. It doesn’t ask you to leave anyone behind. It asks you to carry them differently.

In the years after Ken died, I noticed him everywhere—not as a ghost, but as a presence woven into the fabric of ordinary days. In the way I packed a camping tub with the same obsessive care he used. In the impulse to make a joke at exactly the wrong moment. In the courage it takes to say yes to something terrifying, which was always his greatest gift to me.

Moving with means your grief becomes a companion rather than an obstacle. It means the person you lost isn’t in the past—they’re in you, shaping how you see, how you love, how you show up. The loss doesn’t disappear. It integrates.

I once wrote a letter to myself from the future—sitting in a hospital room while Ken was still alive, borrowing strength from a version of myself I couldn’t yet see. I wrote that someday, when I thought of him, I’d feel no sadness. Only joy and gratitude. That he would be “only gone in one respect, but ever present in so many more.”

I didn’t believe it when I wrote it. But I wrote it anyway. And that act — the willingness to imagine healing before it existed—became its own kind of faith.

The Shift That Changes Everything

There’s a particular moment—and I can’t tell you exactly when it arrived, because it didn’t announce itself—when I stopped measuring my life against the one I’d lost and started living the one I had.

Not instead of Ken. Alongside him.

I started camping again—something I’d been sure I could never do without him. The same percolator. The same tent. The first morning I heard that familiar hiss and burble on the camp stove, I didn’t fall apart. It filled me. He was there in the ritual he’d built, in the way he’d labeled every container and packed the foil and salt. He was taking care of me still.

That’s what moving with looks like. It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t look like healing in the movies. It looks like a cup of coffee at a campsite. It looks like laughing at a joke you know he would have made first.

A Note for Where You Might Be Right Now

If you’re early in loss, I’m not going to tell you this is what you’ll feel eventually—because that’s the kind of thing people say that lands like a stone thrown into deep water. Unhelpful, no matter how true.

What I will say is this: you don’t have to be over it to be okay. You don’t have to close the chapter to open a new one. The love you carry isn’t a weight you need to set down—it’s part of what holds you up.

Ken’s message from that garden still sits framed where I can see it. We still exist together. Not as a comfort I reach for only in dark moments—as a fact I live inside every day.

That’s the difference. Moving on asks you to leave. Moving with asks you to become.

These essays—and so many more—are collected in my book The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us. You can find more information and pre-order the ebook here. Launch day is March 23, 2026—the 25^th anniversary of when I met Ken and fell in love with him.

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