There’s a strange grief that comes with getting everything you thought you wanted.
The home. The freedom. The time.
And then, the silence.
I used to live on adrenaline. Long hours. Constant motion. A calendar packed with meetings, flights, activities. There was always someone to respond to, something to fix, somewhere to be.
It kept the noise going—and kept me from myself.
Then everything changed.
For twenty years, it was just my mother and me.
When your only remaining parent is gone, something shifts.
You become more aware of what anchored you and what no longer exists.
Late 2021, I flew to New York to be with my mother. My husband joined me in December — and somewhere in those weeks, we decided to move back. There was an excitement to it, a sense of return for me. What I didn’t know was how little time there was.
Two more hospitalizations, and then she passed on February 7, 2022.
We were already committed — SF home sold, Brooklyn apartment secured, move-in date March 6. Timing, as always, had its own logic.
We flew back to SF after the burial — only to turn around and drive cross-country back to New York with our aging cat, Beau. He was always chatty, as if he had something to say about everything, but he travelled well, content with the motion of the car.
It was a long drive. I was managing panic, and trying to make the best of it as we went.
I still had my mother’s apartment to pack up. Box by box. I did that alone.
We were in flux. Between coasts. Between lives.
We had rented an apartment in Dumbo. I hadn’t lived in Brooklyn since my twenties — California had long since become home. I thought I’d be closer to care for my mother, and we’d be in a neighborhood my husband would enjoy. It seemed logical at the time. It was removed from her neighborhood and from the Brooklyn I’d known, touristy, and nothing about it felt like mine.
The apartment felt dark, noisy, empty. Why was I back now? She was gone.
And the weight of that — the finality, the disorientation — hit me hard. I buried her, we got on a plane, and landed in a place that felt as far from home as I could be.
I didn’t feel grounded. I felt displaced.
Grief. Disorientation. Memories I hadn’t processed. Old coping habits I had justified with busyness.
I was so used to being productive that rest felt like guilt. Stillness felt like failure. Without the constant hum of activity, I felt unrooted.
And when the noise stopped, I realized how hard it was to be alone with myself. I had always found ways to stay busy.
No structure. No rhythm to orient my day.
Life was becoming a blur. The grief I ignored had settled into my body. Panic attacks. A nervous system in revolt. Vitals that told a story I denied. I did what I always did — appeared functional. Except this time the wheels had come off in ways I couldn’t manage, minimize, or outrun. It went on for a long time — despite my talent for disguising unwell as functional. This was a collapse.
I tackled packing her apartment in chunks. Some days I couldn’t be there long. Other days, I’d linger—looking through photos from a past life. It took months to finish.
Then we moved into a luxury high-rise that was directly within Brooklyn Bridge Park — the kind of address with an amazing view of the Manhattan skyline I could only have dreamt of in my twenties. It was quiet, filled with sunlight, and felt like a world away from everything I had just been through.
Living there, her absence was everywhere.
For Thanksgiving in 2019, the last one we’d share, I had taken her to a nearby waterfront restaurant overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge. She would’ve been perfectly content somewhere a couple of blocks from her apartment — she preferred to be close to home. I always tried to make our time together feel special.
Looking back, the bridge feels symbolic — her crossing into a new life in America, the space between us, a connection always just out of reach. Now I live near that same bridge — somewhere adjacent, elevated, separate — almost as if the distance between us had mirrored my return.
I’d see the Statue of Liberty from my window and think of her arriving in her twenties, crossing that same harbor with nothing, and everything she wouldn’t say. I wish I had known the woman she was then.
In hindsight, none of it made sense. But we had all our furniture, Beau, and grief doesn’t always make logical decisions.
Later, we returned to Healdsburg. A brighter, more open unit unexpectedly became available in our complex — something that rarely happens. It felt like the right move. We still have our place in Brooklyn. Both familiar. Both somehow still trying to become home.
New York without her is a different place entirely.
It wasn’t until October 2024 that I ran out of road. I had to take my life back if I wanted one, and I started to rebuild it.
I started staying up late — really late — writing. It felt like the only place my voice returned. I could finally hear myself think.
But morning would come, and I’d feel groggy. Disoriented. Detached.
My body begged for rhythm. But my mind was still spinning in that nocturnal place of memory, creation, reflection, and grief.
I had lost the thread of myself.
I need roots.
I’ve spent a lifetime packing, moving, starting over again and again. I feel worn and unsettled.
Maybe all the changes were an attempt to outrun the pain. A way I looked outside myself when I really needed to root back into myself.
The writing has helped. So has naming it.
This is what unrooted feels like:
- Drifting through the days without structure and routine
- Mourning friendships that were once vibrant and have quietly shifted
- Wanting to reach out to old friends—but feeling too fractured
- Feeling physically out of sync—exhausted, foggy, drained, a body asking for new rhythms
- Wondering who you are without the old roles, titles, or urgency
- Realizing the quiet reveals what the noise once hid
And there are days when even naming this feels like too much.
But in the stillness, something softer stirs.
Maybe this isn’t a breakdown, but a return.
Not a detour—a recalibration.
Not a void—an invitation to re-root.
In yourself. In your body. In your values. In your life—not as it was, but as it is now.
That re-rooting doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in moments. In small gestures of care. In slow, quiet ways.
And that takes courage.
So now I Get Up. Get Dressed. And Get Out.
You’re not lost. You’re listening. And that’s where it begins.”
Read:
→ Suspended Above Life
→ Peace Is Choosing Yourself
→ Emotional Inheritance
→ The Science of the Healing State
→ The 30-Day Reset
