LIVING WITH LOSS      

You cannot always see it.

The pain people carry.

The grief that lives beneath the surface of someone’s smile or silence. Yet all around us, people are walking through life wounded—living with loss.  Whether IT’s the end of a relationship, the loss of a dream, or the aching absence of someone you love, loss leaves a deep mark on the soul.

I know this personally. I’ve lived through a string of devastating losses that changed me forever. When I was just three, my parents divorced and my brothers and I ended up in an orphanage. At ten, my eldest brother Joe died in a tractor accident. At sixteen, my mother—battling the demons of depression—died by suicide. And at twenty-six, my brother Pete fell fifty feet from a scaffold and was killed.

After the loss of my eldest brother, I remember looking at my grandmother cooking and thinking, “Why are you doing this? Who can eat at a time like this?” I had lost not only my appetite for food, but for life itself.

Grief isn’t tidy. It doesn’t come in predictable stages. People talk about five, seven, even fourteen stages of grief. But for me, there are only two: who we were before, and who we become after the loss of a loved one.

Loss rewrites your story. It alters your identity. At one point, I clung to my grief, afraid that moving forward meant I was leaving my loved ones behind. I feared healing would mean forgetting. And so I held onto the pain like it was sacred. I wore it like a name tag: “Grieving. Still hurting. Always will be.”

But I’ve come to see that it’s not dishonouring to live again. In fact, it’s one of the most powerful ways we can honour those we’ve lost. The truth is, love never dies—and that love doesn’t vanish when you choose to heal. It stays with you, it shapes you, it fuels you to live a fuller life in their memory.

The Bible says that Jesus was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” in Isaiah 53:3. He knows what it’s like to mourn. And yet, He also came to bring joy: “that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11). So yes, both sorrow and joy can live in the same heart.

One of the most hopeful things I’ve discovered is this: Jesus is drawn to the broken. He doesn’t ignore bruised reeds or snuff out smouldering wicks (Isaiah 42:3). He gently heals the wounded, binds up broken hearts, and breathes new life into people who thought their story had ended in a cemetery.

Living with loss has changed my eyesight. I now see hurting people in a new way. I listen differently. I sit with them without needing to fix them. And you know what? This is where true joy is found—not in denying the pain, but in offering comfort to fellow travellers on the same road. Being that quiet presence—silently sitting in another’s sorrow—reflects Christ’s own compassion.

If you’ve experienced loss, you are not alone. I invite you to join me this month on It Is Written Canada, where I share more of my story in a program called “Living with Loss.” You can watch it on CTV or online at iiw.ca. My prayer is that, as we journey together, we can discover how grief may shape us—but it doesn’t have to define us.