08/11/2026
Today, I’m not posting as the therapist. I’m posting as Angie…the human being.
The past month has brought more loss than my heart feels prepared to carry.
And then Sunday came.
I lost a woman who was never “like” a second mother to me. She was my other mother. That is the only way I know how to describe what she meant to me.
You couldn’t tell me I wasn’t her child. Her children are my siblings. Their children are my nieces and nephews. There was never a need for blood to define what we were to one another. Love had already done that.
And this loss hurts. Deeply.
Perhaps one of the hardest parts about grief is that it rarely arrives alone. Sometimes a new loss reaches backward and touches every place in you that has ever had to say goodbye.
So while I am grieving her, I find myself grieving my grandmother all over again. I find myself touching places of grief surrounding my father that I thought I had learned to live around. Memories, emotions, questions and feelings that had become quieter suddenly have a voice again.
And yes… I’m a therapist. I have sat with people through some of the most painful moments of their lives. I understand grief. I know the terminology. I know the stages aren’t linear. I know the coping skills. I know what I would say to someone sitting across from me experiencing exactly what I am experiencing right now.
But knowing about grief does not exempt you from having to feel it.
Right now, I am feeling it.
And maybe that is what I want people to understand most.
Life is precious. It is fragile. And sometimes we move through it as though we have unlimited time with the people we love.
We don’t. And as I navigate this season of grief—some of it new and some of it resurfacing—I am giving myself permission to do something I encourage others to do every day:
Feel what I feel.
No rushing it.
No intellectualizing it.
No pretending I’m okay because I know how grief works.
Just allowing myself to be human.
Because before I am Dr. Angie, the therapist who helps other people carry difficult things…
I am Angela., , a woman who is grieving someone she loved very, very much.
