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After 10 years of cancer treatments, surgeries, and more suffering than I thought one body could hold, my mom smiled right before she took her last breath.
I had spent months carrying a grief that felt impossible. I knew what was coming long before anyone would say it out loud, and I spent countless nights wondering how I would survive without her.
But when she finally left this world, something unexpected happened: instead of feeling detached from life, I felt more connected to it. The colors seemed brighter. I noticed beauty in places I’d walked past a hundred times. Strangest of all, I felt closer to my mom than I had in years.
That wasn’t what I expected grief to feel like. And it ultimately set me on a healing journey I never saw coming.
As a little girl, my dream was to be a dancer and an actress. My mom was my first dance teacher, and being on stage felt like home. I chased that dream all the way to Los Angeles, where I was building a career in entertainment until I got the phone call that changed everything: my mom had cancer.
She was my mom. Moms are supposed to be the strong, steady ones. But over the next decade, cancer became part of our family’s daily life. After I got married and became pregnant with my first child, I walked away from the career I’d spent years building and moved back to Florida to be near her.
At the time it felt like giving up my dream. Looking back, I was stepping into my purpose.
She fought with extraordinary courage, and we grew closer than we had ever been. Somewhere in the middle of all that, my definition of success changed. The spotlight no longer mattered, but showing up for the people I loved did.
When she passed in 2018, I was raising two small children, and motherhood helped me understand her in ways I never had. I started to see her sacrifices: the sleepless nights, the worry, all the invisible acts of love that fill a mother’s days. For the first time, I saw that she wasn’t just my mom. She was a woman figuring out life as she went, same as me. That realization softened something in me, and slowly my grief turned into gratitude.
In those early years, I felt her everywhere: in coincidences, in unexpected peace, in quiet nudges that arrived exactly when I needed them. But as time went on, that connection started to fade, and I found myself longing to feel her presence the way I had right after she passed.
Then, at a retreat a few years later, something happened that I still can’t explain. I met a woman named Heidi, and before we parted she handed me a children’s book called Maybe by Kobi Yamada. Driving home a few days later, I asked my mom for a sign: a barred owl, specifically. When I finally sat down alone with the book at home (my kids had zero interest in it), I turned the pages and there were barred owls woven all through the illustrations.
I sat there stunned. The book was about possibility, purpose, and the gifts we each carry inside us. It didn’t feel like a random gift from a stranger. It felt like my mom whispering, “You’re not done yet.”
That night I woke around 3 a.m. with words flooding my mind. Half asleep, I typed them into the notes app on my phone. In the morning I showed them to my husband, a songwriter and musician. He disappeared into his studio and came back that evening with his guitar and a song. As the melody filled our living room, tears streamed down my face. Years of grief were finally moving through me: not because the pain was gone, but because I finally understood that love doesn’t end when a life does. Relationships don’t disappear. They evolve.
That song became “Are You Here?” And a year later came another nudge: write the book. I was a former dancer, not a children’s book author. This wasn’t the plan. But nothing about this had been the plan, so I listened. The story I had needed to hear became the story I wanted to share. Not because I have all the answers about grief, but because I know how lonely it can feel, and how healing it is to believe that love continues.
What I understand now is that the dream we carry as children isn’t always the destination. Sometimes it’s just the path that takes us where we’re meant to go.
If you’re in the middle of grieving a person, a dream, or a version of yourself that no longer exists, I hope you’ll remember that what you’re being asked to release may just be making room for something greater. Pay attention to the nudges, listen to your heart, and trust what keeps calling you forward.
Because sometimes a song, a book, and a stranger can be the very things that help you find your way home.
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