We Had to Relearn How to Be a Family After My Daughter Died

We suffered deeply and we suffered alone

Flowers in my garden — Photo by author

When I became a mother twenty-five years ago, I understood that my life wasn’t my own anymore. It revolved around the other members of my familial collective, my husband and my two daughters. Four was the number that felt complete.

My world was driven by this new connected identity. We did everything together, planned holidays as a family, and made decisions for the good of our collective rather than the benefit of one specific part of the whole.

And we were whole. That’s how it felt to me. We were whole and perfect and never alone. Yes, it could be overwhelming, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss that time when we all fit together like a perfect, seamless puzzle.

I took life for granted. I was perennially distracted. I was too wrapped up in the day-to-day bustle of raising the girls and keeping the family machine running to worry about what the future would look like. I stopped paying attention to each individual piece of the whole. I assumed the way we existed — as a family of four — would last forever.

I didn’t know it then, but that blurring of boundaries had set me up for a massive identity crisis. It blinded me to the fragility of my family. It left me vulnerable to the devastating soul-deep loneliness that overwhelmed me when one of my children died.

It’s been nearly a decade since we were a family of four. These days, the house is incredibly quiet, especially on these lonely summer mornings when I’m the only one awake. I often wonder if those frantic years as a young family were even real. It seems entirely possible that the version of my family that I’m remembering was, in fact, a dream.

I don’t know if other families have a sweet-spot moment in their existence the way mine did (or the way that I remember we did). We were far from perfect. We were a tangle of shoes, cluttered tables, dirty dishes, and dinnertime chaos. We were bedtimes and bath times and Pixar movies on Friday nights. We were oblivious to the privilege of our own oblivion.

I sat at the helm of that version of us — navigating the constant stopping and starting of school years, riding the crest of the seasons, wrapping my dear ones in holiday trimmings, and (of course) charting the growth spurts and milestones of my girls as the years passed.

This didn’t stop when my older daughter, Ana, was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 11. If anything, we became more tightly bound through long hospital stays, home isolation, a bucket list of dream vacations, and the constant heavy certainty that she (we) wouldn’t survive. We crammed it all into the almost five years between the day of Ana’s first hospitalization and the day she died.

She died. Our world fractured. It wasn’t so much that we became suddenly, brutally, a family of three. It was more like we unbecame a family of four.

During the earliest days of deep grief, I desperately tried to create a familiar family cadence that no longer existed, grasping for a way to survive the terrible pain of losing Ana. I needed to stitch the three of us back together, to find ways to reconnect with my husband and younger daughter, Emily.

At 12 years old, Emily had been intent on carrying on as if nothing had happened. She was watching me closely back then, no doubt afraid that if she looked away, I might disappear too.

Losing Ana destabilized the entire foundation of our lives. It reverberated through every peak and valley, changing how we each saw the world and interacted with each other. We became a table with three legs, a map missing one direction, a tripod of grief.

We were forced to reconfigure our relationship as a family and reexamine our individual identities. This was essential for survival. Ana was gone, and we all shared the bottomless emptiness of her absence, but we experienced grief separately. We could not help each other. We were adrift in our individual bubbles of agony, and though we had a sense of the terrible pain we were all experiencing, there was no way to rally together as we’d done in the past.

We’d lost the fourth direction. We had no idea how to find our way back to each other. At least at first.

A long time ago, someone told me that I should enjoy my kids while they were still small. “It goes by so fast,” they’d said. “Cherish these years.”

I didn’t believe it would go by fast, not when I was still in the thick of it. I thought their childhood would be a slow burn. I knew our family dynamic would shift as the girls got older, but I figured this would happen gradually and that we would adapt in ways that kept the four of us closely connected forever.

Then, suddenly, there were only three of us. Grief wedged itself between us, and for the first time in almost 16 years, I could not get comfort from my family. I needed to talk about Ana — all the time, every day. My husband needed to mourn quietly and privately. Emily needed to pretend she’d never had a sister at all. We tiptoed around each other for the first six months. Ana’s absence was like a wound, raw and weeping. Everything we did together reminded us of what — of who — we’d lost.

Three place settings at the table meant we stopped having dinner together.

Reminders of how Ana had loved a certain park or food or grocery store meant we avoided all of these things.

Celebrations, holidays, birthdays, and events that we’d once anticipated and loved went by with little or no fanfare.

The house fell quiet. We suffered deeply and we suffered alone.

The fracture that occurred in my family, the ongoing repercussions of losing someone so central to our collective and individual identities, and the perpetual pain of missing Ana did not go away, at least not completely. We eventually learned to navigate our new normal, but it’s taken nearly a decade to cobble together a new kind of family.

We’re smaller. In some ways, we’re less connected. In others, we’re closer than we’ve ever been. I learned to recognize the difference between grief and loneliness, but also when these two feelings intersect. I learned to understand and honor the fact that my grief is not their grief and that this is okay.

We all grieve differently. We experience trauma and pain differently too. This has been my loneliest realization. I could not go with Ana when she died, but I wanted to. I ached to hold her hand and descend into the unknown with her. But, of course, she had to do this alone.

I can support Emily as she navigates grief, but the full realization of what she’s lost — something that she finally understands now that she’s 22— is hers to grapple with on her own. Honoring this in a way that supports Emily without diminishing the way she grieves is something I worked hard to do. I don’t drive the ship the way I once did. Letting go of that former role — that former life — was hard. But it was also a relief.

In the past nine years, I’ve learned to accept the new shape of our family. Emily is still home and trying to figure out what she wants to do next. She’s been working as a gardener, battling some demons, and finding her footing in the world (with lots of support from me).

I turned 55 in May. Though we each grieve in our own way, we talk about Ana when it feels natural and needed. We accept that there’s more silence in the house. We have discovered new ways to connect (hint: the garden), and I’ve learned to enjoy my solitude again.

Sometimes it still feels like we’re a family of four. We bring Ana into our lives in new, unexpected ways. Emily writes songs about her sister. She’s learning to play Ana’s old guitar. She collects crystals and stones, a favorite hobby of Ana’s. My husband and I visit Ana’s favorite places on her birthday and holidays and on the day she died. He listens to the music that Ana loved. I write about her.

I take long walks on quiet trails and talk to her, pointing out tulip trees and downy woodpeckers. About a year after Ana died, I started a Day of the Dead ritual for Ana. I set up an altar for her and adorn it with her photo and with stones, candles, and flowers. At one point, I lamented to Emily that it was difficult to find fresh marigolds — the traditional flower used for Day of the Dead altars.

Now, every year, Emily brings me marigold seedlings to plant each spring. Emily adores the garden and she’s absolutely made it her own. She waters it every day. She knows how important it is to put fresh marigolds on our altar in November and she’s started creating her own altar as well. These altars are separate, but we adorn them with the marigolds we grew together.

A version of this story was originally published here.