What Grief Revealed About My Heart (Continuing to Learn to Trust God After Loss)
This March caught me off guard.
Not just because it felt heavy, but because of what God began to show me in the middle of it.
The emotions, the memories, the fatigue are often things that show up during a heavy season.
What I didn’t expect was what was underneath it.
As the month unfolded, I found myself holding my family a little tighter than usual.
My husband.
My kids.
There was this fear of uncertainty I hadn’t fully acknowledged before.
And little by little, God began to bring it into the light.
I realized that I’m still holding onto them.
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Why Grief Feels Heavier in Certain Seasons (When Your Body Remembers)
This has been a long winter.
And if you live in New England, you know how it can feel like it will never end. The gray days stretch on, the cold lingers, and you start to wonder if spring will ever actually come.
But for me, March has felt heavy in a different way.
For a while, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I would just notice it—feeling off, more emotional, more tired, a little foggy. Like I was carrying something I couldn’t fully name.
Until I remembered.
Eighteen years ago, Jon spent the entire month of March in the hospital, going through intense cancer treatments. Every day was long. Uncertain. Heavy with decisions and fear.
One year later, March came again—and this time, he was getting sicker and sicker, and we didn’t know why. There were no clear answers, just a slow decline that didn’t make sense. And no matter what the doctors did, he kept getting worse.
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Homeschooling After Loss
Jon and I made the decision to homeschool early on in our parenting journey. It wasn’t something we stumbled into, it was something we felt deeply about.
We wanted to be intentional about what our kids were learning, not just academically, but spiritually.
We wanted to teach them Biblical truth and help shape their character in a way that aligned with our faith.
We wanted flexibility in our days.
Jon had worked with many public school students, and he saw firsthand the challenges they were facing. He was concerned about the influence of the world, and he often talked about the lack of practical life skills being taught. We wanted something different for our kids.
What we didn’t know at the time was how much of a gift homeschooling would become when everything changed.
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Surrender, Inflammation, and Learning to Breathe Again
Looking back, I can see what I couldn’t see then.
It wasn’t just trauma.
It wasn’t just stress.
It wasn’t just sleepless nights.
It was my grip.
I was holding everything tightly.
Holding my grief because if I fully felt it, I feared it would consume me.
Holding my schedule because busyness numbed the ache.
Holding my future because I was determined nothing like this would ever happen again.
But control is exhausting.
And my body was paying the price.
The more tightly I tried to manage my health, my children, my grief, and every possible outcome, the more my inflammation seemed to climb. It was as if my body mirrored my heart, bracing constantly.
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When My Body Forced Me to Stop
Eventually, my body gave out.
My colitis flared severely. I stopped sleeping. Anxiety became a daily companion. My weight dropped because during flares my body couldn’t properly absorb nutrients, no matter how healthy I ate.
In 2012, unexplained hives appeared — head to toe. Angry. Persistent. Daily.
For three years.
At the time, I didn’t understand what was happening. In hindsight, I see it clearly: prolonged trauma, chronic stress, systemic inflammation, and postponed grief had overwhelmed my system.
My body was screaming what my heart had been suppressing.
Sleep became fractured. I would fall asleep quickly, only to wake around midnight or 1:00 a.m., wide awake. My mind would race in the dark. Fear felt louder at night.
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