What Losing My Mum Taught Me About Meaning, Pain, and Moving Forward
Grief doesn’t arrive politely.
It doesn’t knock, take a seat, and explain itself.
It barges in, rearranges the furniture of your life, and leaves you standing in a room that feels familiar… but isn’t.
Losing my mum to a heroin overdose wasn’t a single moment. It was a slow, complicated story that stretched over years. Addiction has a way of doing that. It blurs lines. It mixes love with frustration, hope with disappointment.
And when it ends, it doesn’t neatly resolve anything.
It just leaves silence.
The Part No One Really Talks About
When people talk about grief, they often focus on sadness.
But grief is more layered than that.
There’s confusion.
There’s anger.
There’s guilt.
There are questions that don’t have clean answers.
You replay moments.
Things you said.
Things you didn’t say.
Things you wish you’d understood differently.
And underneath it all, there’s this quiet, persistent thought:
How do I move forward from this?
Not in a dramatic, “everything changes overnight” kind of way.
Just… how do you keep going?
Trying to “Fix” the Pain
For a while, like most people, I tried to outthink it.
Stay busy.
Stay productive.
Stay distracted.
If you move fast enough, you don’t have to sit with it.
But pain doesn’t work like that.
It waits.
It doesn’t chase you down. It just lingers in the background, like a song you didn’t choose but somehow keeps playing.
And eventually, you realise something important:
You don’t move forward by avoiding it.
You move forward by facing it.
What Helped Me Make Sense of It
There were a few ideas that shifted things for me. Not in a “fix everything” way. More like turning the lights on in a dark room.
One of them came from Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
Frankl didn’t talk about avoiding suffering. He talked about finding meaning within it.
That’s a very different approach.
It’s not:
“How do I get rid of this pain?”
It’s:
“What does this pain teach me about what matters?”
That question doesn’t make things easier. But it makes them clearer.
Presence Changes Everything
Another shift came through The Power of Now and A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle.
Before that, I spent a lot of time either in the past or the future.
Replaying what happened.
Imagining different outcomes.
Thinking about what could have been done differently.
But the present moment is quieter than that.
It doesn’t carry all the stories.
It just asks you to be here.
Not to solve everything.
Not to have it all figured out.
Just to sit with what is.
And strangely, that’s where things start to soften.
Not disappear. Just soften.
What Grief Quietly Teaches You
Grief has a way of stripping life back to its essentials.
It removes the noise.
Things that once felt urgent start to feel… less important.
You begin to see more clearly:
Who actually matters in your life
How you spend your time
What you want to be present for
As a dad now, with two kids growing up fast, that awareness hits differently.
You notice the small moments more.
A conversation at the dinner table.
A laugh that wasn’t planned.
A random question that turns into something meaningful.
Because you know, in a way you can’t unknow, that time isn’t guaranteed.
Moving Forward (Without “Moving On”)
There’s a phrase people often use:
“Moving on.”
But that never felt quite right to me.
Moving on sounds like leaving something behind.
And some things aren’t meant to be left behind.
They’re meant to be carried.
Not as a weight that drags you down…
But as something that shapes how you live.
Moving forward looks more like this:
Allowing the pain to exist without letting it define everything
Taking what it’s taught you and applying it to how you show up
Choosing to live with more intention because of it, not in spite of it
A Different Kind of Strength
There’s a quiet strength that comes from going through something like this.
Not loud. Not obvious.
It doesn’t look like having all the answers.
It looks like:
Sitting with uncomfortable emotions without running
Being present even when it’s hard
Continuing to show up for the people in your life
That kind of strength doesn’t come from avoiding pain.
It comes from walking through it.
A Question Worth Asking
If you’ve been through something difficult, or if you’re in it right now, this might be worth sitting with:
What has this experience shown you about what matters?
Not what it’s taken.
Not what it’s broken.
What it’s revealed.
Final Thought
Losing my mum didn’t come with a lesson neatly packaged at the end.
It came with a lot of questions.
But over time, a few things became clear.
Life is more fragile than we like to admit.
Time with people matters more than we think.
And meaning isn’t something you find at the end of the road.
It’s something you build, moment by moment, in how you choose to live.
Even after loss.
Even with pain still there.
Especially then.
