Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had the strange feeling that life has been trying to tell me something, and I’m not sure entirely sure what it is.

My mom’s youngest sister died. Then my dad’s younger sister died. And somewhere in between, we sold this old house that I love so much.

On the surface, these seem like unrelated events. Death. Real estate. Paperwork. Grief. But the longer I sit with it, the harder it is to separate one from the other. They all seem to belong to the same conversation.

Aside from the sadness of knowing that two genuinely good people suffered in their final days, their deaths stirred something deeper in me. Not heartbreak, exactly. Well yes, some heartbreak too. But also a growing awareness that the world I grew up in is gradually receding into the past.

It’s only there now in old photographs that mostly remind you how many lifetimes can fit inside of one life. The ones that return you to a world that felt slower and far more permanent than it really was. You look at them and realize that many of the people who once seemed woven into the fabric of things now exist mostly in memory.

We weren’t particularly close-knit families. We weren’t dropping by each other’s houses every Sunday for roast beef and pie. But I took comfort in the simple reassurance of knowing my aunts were out there, occupying their place in the family constellation – in the larger story of us. 

And if I’m honest, I think they connected me to an idea I had about family. Not necessarily the family we were, but the family I imagined. The one that existed sometimes on a Sunday afternoon at grandma and grandpa’s. Or, in old photographs and childhood assumptions. At least the one where all the branches of the tree remained intact.

But the tree keeps thinning. It’s canopy is letting more and more light through now. It’s a peculiar thing to discover that you’ve gone from being one of the younger characters in the family story to one of the people responsible for carrying it forward.

Whether you’re ready or not.

But then, I don’t think readiness has much to do with it. Life rarely waits until you’ve caught up. You just get really good at continuing.

Which brings me to the house. Selling something you love feels wrong right up until you realize you’re doing it for another thing you love. A new place yes, but even more than that, new possibilities. The chance to loosen your grip on the logistics of your life and tighten it around the living of it. 

After all, isn’t that what we’re here for? The living of it?

If the relentless lessons in impermanence that life keeps handing out have any use at all, maybe it’s this: to remind us that none of us are getting out alive and none of this was ever all that serious to begin with. So, enjoy it while you can. 

So much of what we’re taught to want, chase, accumulate, and hang onto isn’t necessarily what makes a life feel meaningful. And these days, I find myself craving meaning. Craving less to manage and more to experience. Less maintaining. More living. 

We all seem to arrive at this point eventually. Where the illusion of forever has worn thin. Where you stop assuming there will always be another Christmas or another summer. Where you suddenly know, with soul-crushing certainty, that the people, places, and seasons you’ve cherished are not permanent. They are gifts. Temporary, beautiful, heartbreaking gifts.

And there is sorrow in knowing they can’t stay. But beneath that murky sadness, there’s also clarity. That this is all part of the same bargain. This wild, short-term cosmic deal we all sign where the privilege was never in getting to keep all these things forever. The privilege was in getting to love them at all. 

And sometimes, just that very knowing can push us to choose our own loss. Like handing over the keys to a big, beautiful century home for a bet on a bigger life filled with a different kind of richness. Measured in experiences, time with family, creative energy, spontaneity, last-minute plane tickets and the growing awareness that time is the most valuable thing we own and the only thing we never get more of.

A bigger life seems a strange thing to ask for when you already have a life you love. Who gets to ask for an even bigger life? Who looks around at a home they’ve cherished, a community they’ve built, and a life rich with memories and says: What if there is still more?

For a long time, I thought gratitude meant never asking that question. I mistook gratitude for permanence, as though loving a life meant never wanting anything beyond it. But loving a life doesn’t mean you’ve stopped growing. If anything, it’s what gives you the courage to keep evolving. And gratitude isn’t what prevents you from asking for more. It’s what gives you permission to.

My mother measured out in teaspoons what she felt she could ask from this life. And as I sit down to sort through bins of her photos and papers for what will probably be the last time, I’m discovering that she is still teaching me about that. Not how to keep a life from changing, but how to love it while it does.

When my dad sold their house in 2019, I carried away boxes and bins and armfuls of treasures, determined to save as much as I could. I wasn’t ready to lose it. Now, standing in the middle of the sprawl in my basement, trying to decide what can stay and what must go, I realize she wasn’t teaching me how to keep everything. She was teaching me how to recognize what matters.

I’ve come to understand that she wasn’t collecting things. She was collecting evidence. Evidence that people had been here. That moments had happened. That a life had been lived. That she loved and was loved right back.

Long before any of us were nostalgic for our lives, she already was. And, my God, what a gift that has been. I’ve spent years grieving the fact that I could no longer hear her voice. I never expected to discover another way for us to continue the conversation.

Sitting there on the basement floor yesterday, surrounded by the things that, until now, neither she nor I couldn’t bear to let go of, it occurred to me that I inherited more than her keepsakes. I inherited her way of seeing.

I am my mother’s daughter. That has been the greatest revelation hidden inside these boxes. This whole time they have held the pieces of a map – back to her. And unexpectedly, deeper into myself. I can see what she loved. I can see what moved her. And I can see how much of it lives on in me.

I see what she understood long before I did: the ordinary moments we barely notice while we’re living them are the very ones we’ll one day want desperately to go back to. That’s what she was trying to tell us with every box she filled. She wasn’t preserving paper or records. It wasn’t the photographs. It wasn’t even the memories.

She was preserving love. 

That’s why it’s been so hard to let go of any of it. But I’m beginning to see that I can. Not because the things she left me matter less now. Quite the opposite. They’ve mattered so much that, over time, they became part of me. For years after she died, they steadied me. They sheltered me. They helped bridge the impossible distance between where she was and where I was. They did their work. 

They live in me now.

Sure, we don’t get to keep what we love forever. But if we’re lucky, the things we lose leave their mark. They shape us in ways both visible and invisible. And when they’re gone, we’re not left empty-handed. We carry forward what they gave us without even realizing it. That’s not the same as keeping them. But it’s the closest thing there is.

I find that heartbreaking. 

And I find it liberating.

People leave. Houses change hands. Entire chapters come to an end. And yet somehow little bits of love remain. 

It slips free of the people and places that carried it.

It moves into us.

It keeps going.

Until one day you come to see that what you’ve been so afraid of losing has been alive in you all along.