Our bodies remembers what our mind tries to tuck away.

Every year, before my mother’s birthday, before Mother’s Day, and around certain dates that live quietly on the calendar of my body, I start to feel off. Heavier, more tender, a little untethered. Sometimes sadness arrives before I understand why and loneliness settles in before my memory catches up.

Before we consciously connect the dots, something in us already knows. The body recognizes the anniversary, the season, the ritual, and the absence before the mind has words for why.

Lately, I’ve been having conversations with people who have lost someone they deeply loved. In those conversations, I keep recognizing something familiar, something I know intimately because I have lived it. We often think grief is just about missing someone, but I think that is only one of grief’s many thorns.

What I’ve come to understand is this: deep grief comes from having so much love left to give the people we have lost. Holidays, and the rituals that come with them, deepen the ache of holding love you can no longer place where it once belonged, with the people you are missing.

For me, deep grief comes from having endless amounts of love left to give the people I have lost. Today, those feelings rise most deeply around my mom, grandma, and aunt, but it’s universal. I know this ache also belongs to anyone still holding love for a sister, child, cousin, parent, partner, friend, or anyone whose absence left love with nowhere certain to land.

No matter how much time passes, I still want to call them, tell them what happened, celebrate them, care for them, hold them, and love them in all the quiet, loud, and familiar ways I once did.

I actively love them still, yet I am left carrying years of love with no certainty about where it goes now. I want to believe they can still receive it somehow, but there is something deeply painful about not knowing.

Grief is not only the ache of love I still want to give. It is also the ache of love I no longer get to receive. I miss their voice, their laughter, their touch, their perfume, their reassurance, their wisdom, the ways we cared for each other, checked on each other, celebrated each other, and wrapped each other in love, especially on special occasions.

Mother’s Day can feel especially difficult because it reminds us not only of who is gone, but of the love we once experienced and can no longer experience in the same way. No call, no hug, no shared meal, no chance to celebrate them with them. The love remains, but the rituals of love are gone, and that feels profoundly lonely.

It has taken me a long time to get here, but when the tears finally dry, I am able to remind myself how lucky I am. One thing I know for sure is this: deep grief is what deep love leaves behind. It is proof of that I got to experience the deepest love.

What a gift it is to have loved and been loved so deeply that their absence still shapes the rhythm of my days. What a gift it is to know a love so real that my body remembers it.

Maybe part of healing is not trying to outrun grief, but learning how to honor the love still living inside us, and learning how to let that love land somewhere—in how we care for ourselves and others, in how we live, in what we carry forward, and in who we become because we were loved.

To anyone holding love with nowhere to put it, this Mother’s Day or any day, I see you.

Remember this. Love remains. Even when it changes shape, it remains.

— Deb