You're Not Broken —
You're Healing.

Grief has a way of making you feel like something inside you has shattered beyond repair. You forget words mid-sentence. You cry in the grocery store over a brand of cereal your loved one used to buy. You wake up at 3 a.m. with a weight on your chest that no amount of prayer or deep breathing seems to lift. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, a quiet, cruel voice whispers: What is wrong with you?

I know that voice. I've heard it. After losing my son to gun violence in Dallas, I spent months convinced that my inability to "get it together" meant I was failing — at grief, at faith, at life. I thought healing was supposed to look like moving forward. Like getting back to normal. Like being okay.

But grief doesn't work that way. And the sooner we stop expecting it to, the sooner we can actually begin to heal.

Grief Is Not a Problem to Solve

Our culture — especially for Black women — has conditioned us to be strong. To keep moving. To hold it together for everyone else while quietly falling apart inside. We are praised for our resilience and rarely given permission to simply be undone.

But grief is not a problem to be solved. It is not a weakness to be overcome. It is the natural, necessary response to love. You grieve deeply because you loved deeply. The size of your grief is a direct reflection of the size of your love — and that is not something to be ashamed of.

When we treat grief like a malfunction — something to fix, suppress, or speed through — we rob ourselves of the very process that leads to healing. Grief, when honored and moved through with intention, is how we integrate loss into our lives. It is how we carry our loved ones forward with us, rather than leaving them behind.

What Grief Recovery Actually Looks Like

Grief recovery is not a straight line. It is not five stages you check off a list. It is not a destination you arrive at where the pain is gone and the sun is always shining. Grief recovery is the ongoing, courageous act of choosing to keep living — fully, intentionally, and with your whole heart — even when it hurts.

In my own journey, and in the stories I've gathered from women across the country, grief recovery tends to look like this:

• Naming what you've lost — not just the person, but the future you imagined, the role they played, the version of yourself that existed when they were here.
• Allowing yourself to feel it — without judgment, without a timeline, without performing strength for anyone else's comfort.
• Finding safe community — women who understand your pain without requiring you to explain it. Healing rarely happens in isolation.
• Returning to your faith — not as a bypass around the pain, but as a companion through it. God is not afraid of your grief. He meets you in it.
• Taking one small step — not toward "normal," but toward the next version of yourself. The woman you are becoming on the other side of this.

Faith as a Foundation, Not a Bypass

For women of faith, grief can carry an extra layer of confusion. We believe in a God who heals, who restores, who works all things together for good. So why does it still hurt this much? Why hasn't prayer made it stop?

I want to gently offer this: faith is not a bypass around grief. It is a foundation beneath it. The Psalms are full of lament — raw, honest, anguished cries to God from people who were not okay. David wept. Job questioned. Jesus himself wept at the tomb of Lazarus, even knowing what was about to happen.

Your grief does not mean your faith is weak. It means you are human. And your God — the one who knit you together and knows every hair on your head — is not surprised by your tears. He is not waiting for you to pull yourself together before He draws near. He is already there, in the valley, with you.

Starting Your Grief Recovery Journey

If you're reading this in the early days of loss, I want you to know: you don't have to have it figured out. You don't have to be further along. You just have to take the next breath, and then the one after that.

Here are three gentle places to begin:

1. Start a grief journal. You don't have to write beautifully or coherently. Write the mess. Write the anger, the confusion, the love, the memories. Getting it out of your head and onto the page is one of the most powerful tools in grief recovery. My resources page includes journaling prompts specifically for grieving mothers.
2. Find one person who can hold space. Not someone who will try to fix you or rush you — someone who will simply sit with you. A trusted friend, a grief counselor, a support group. You were not meant to carry this alone.
3. Read stories of women who've walked this road. There is something profoundly healing about knowing you are not the first, and you will not be the last. My book Open Gate was written for exactly this — to give voice to the grief that so many women carry in silence.