The Love That Found Me After Loss: A Story of Quiet Grace

bench on a lake.

You don’t always realize when life is preparing you for heartbreak.

Sometimes the setup looks ordinary, a move you weren’t excited about, a job you took without knowing how important it would be.

But later, in the soft ache of hindsight, you start to see it: how love was already moving, already gathering around you, quietly making space for the devastation it knew was coming.

That’s what the town that ended up becoming home was for me.

Not a dream destination.

Not a plan.

Just a shift.

But when he died, it became the ground I didn’t know I would need.

If we had still been in the place we were before, I would’ve been alone, truly, unbearably alone.

But this new place and its community held me.

The local restaurants made sure I was fed.

Strangers became caretakers.

They came to my house.

They sat with me in the dark.

They made sure I didn’t disappear.

Looking back, I see it so clearly: the net was already being woven.

And then there were the dreams.

One night, I was pulled toward a woman’s name I didn’t recognize.

Something in me said, go to her house.

When I looked her up, I found she was a Reiki teacher, and the next evening, she was hosting a mediumship circle.

I walked in not knowing what I’d find.

Three mediums stood at the front — clairvoyant, clairaudient, clairsentient.

But it was the ones who could feel and hear who reached me.

One brought him through, soft and unmistakable.

I returned to her for years.

The other became my teacher.

A red-haired angel with a cherub’s face, she opened her door and said, “You’re home.

”That was the first night I felt anything good again.

She taught me to listen to spirit, to trust the channel, to be held.

Another teacher would follow — a different light, but just as steady.

And suddenly, I had women around me who didn’t try to fix me, they just kept the lamp on while I stumbled my way back to myself.

I think we underestimate what it means to be remembered.

To be checked on.

To be texted every morning by someone who writes, “breathe.”

Or to have a friend log into a chat window, day after day, just to send you messages all day long, because they know the silence would hurt more than their distraction at work.

Some people flew across states to sit on my couch.

Others brought gifts on anniversaries I didn’t want to speak about.

And it kept going.

One day, angry and broken and alone at the mall,

I looked up at a Jeep in front of me and saw the word “UNDEAD.”

It made me pause.

Laugh.

Cry.

It became the beginning of a strange thread —license plates that seemed to speak.

ONE DAY BACK.

WITH YOU ALWAYS.

Coincidence?

I started calling them co-incidents —moments in partnership with the divine.

Him, whispering in pixels and bumpers and open skies.

There was the night I woke up choking, gasping, and moments later, the police knocked on my door.

They’d received repeated silent calls from my number.

But my phone was off. Unplugged. Still — somehow — a call had gone out.

I think he was trying to keep me alive.

And the strangers online, women who had also lost their partners, who messaged me, shared their art, who knew how to hold grief without explaining it away.

And then, there was the inn.

My first birthday alone.

A place he would’ve taken me.

A place he wanted to take me.

So, I went. Alone.

It was luxurious and on all the travel lists and Top 1000 Places to Go Before You Die.

But what I remember most wasn’t the elegance, it was the care.

They treated me like someone precious.

Set my table facing the garden.

Gave me books.

Signed the menu with love.

Escorted me from one soft handoff to the next, as if I were being passed in a wool blanket from one guardian to another.

I’ve gone back almost every year since.

Not to repeat the past, but to remember what it feels like to be seen by strangers and held like family.

This is how love found me after loss.

Not in big, dramatic resurrections, but in whispers.

In timings.

In people who stayed.

In dreams, I listened to.

In gardens I didn’t plant, but somehow still bloomed for me.

Love found me in broken places.

In small texts and unexpected hugs.

In red hair and radiated light.

In the sound of my own breath, I realized I was still here.

You don’t have to believe in signs.

You don’t have to believe in energy or spirit.

But I do.

Because I lived it.

Because I was kept alive by the quiet choreography of grace.

And I will never forget the way love kept arriving, even when I thought I had lost it for good.