There is a specific, devastating kind of quiet that settles into my life after a monumental loss. It is the kind of silence that doesn’t just sit in the room; it heavy-presses against my chest, demanding to be acknowledged, even when I am doing everything in my power to look the other way.

Before my world cracked open, I was operating within the high-energy, hyper-focused framework of a routine I truly built for myself from scratch. My alarm would go off in the pitch-black desert morning, the air still cool before the Arizona sun could claim the day. By 6:00 AM, I was sitting in front of my monitors, logging into my twelve-week-long technical customer support training shift. And the truth is? I absolutely loved it. It wasn’t some draining chore I dragged myself to; it was exciting. My brain was firing on all cylinders—learning how to navigate complex new systems, mastering databases, tracking down intricate logic puzzles, and realizing every single morning that I was damn good at it. It gave me a profound sense of momentum, a sharp spark of pride before the rest of the world was even awake.

That technical focus was the anchor for the rest of my day. It gave me a clean, structured space where inputs led to predictable outputs—a sharp contrast to the unpredictability of life.

When 2:30 PM hit and I logged off, I immediately stepped into the rest of the life I was fiercely, unapologetically protecting. It was the rewarding, exhausting daily rhythm of holding my personal world together. It was taking care of the house. It was building a life, a home, and a sanctuary with Ronnie. It was managing the beautiful, chaotic, sliding energy of our ferrets in their dedicated room. And woven through every single hour of that structure was Mom—taking care of her, managing her affairs, checking in, and balancing her mounting needs with the vibrant, independent life I was trying so hard to cultivate.

I wasn’t just dragging my feet through the weeks; I was actively thriving in them. I was incredibly proud of the balance I was striking, proud of the corporate technical career path I was carving out for myself, and completely invested in the future we were building under this roof.

And then, the world axis shifts.

On May 4th, my mom passed away.

The Surreal Checklist: Navigating the Immediate “After”

Grief rarely gives me a courtesy warning, and it certainly doesn’t pause to let me catch my breath. The morning of May 5th didn’t bring the familiar comfort of my 6:00 AM shift. Instead, it was day two of trying to get my mom’s affairs in order. I started five days of bereavement leave from my job, which, combined with the weekend, gave me a long, heavy stretch of time before I was scheduled to go back to work on May 12th.

There is a clinical, freezing cold checklist that accompanies the end of a human life, and for seven straight days, I found myself doing things that felt entirely automated, almost robotic. I was forced to step into a parallel reality where I was actively responding to formal, sterile requests for “the deceased.” I was filing away endless, sharp paperwork that reduced a vibrant, complicated human life to a mere set of accounts, dates, and account numbers. I had to practice speaking about the woman who gave me life entirely in the past tense.

It was a bizarre, out-of-body experience. The weight of it sat heavily in the corners of the room, and the silence of those seven days was deafening.

By the time May 12th finally arrived, I was desperate for my anchor. Walking back into my training shift at 6:00 AM wasn’t a chore; it was a lifeline. I threw myself into my monitors, using those hours to lock my brain into technical logic, system architectures, and database troubleshooting. Because I truly loved the work, it became a safe space—a place where systems made sense, where code behaved, and where I could simply be “Rae the technical professional” instead of “Rae the grieving, broken daughter.”

But the contrast was jarring, almost violent. I would spend eight solid hours crushing a technical training path I was genuinely excited about, feeling that spark of professional competence, and then the shift would end at 2:30 PM.

The moment I close that laptop, the technical shield drops. The support texts from the outside world slow down, the house gets incredibly quiet, and the heavy Tucson afternoon air just seems to press inward against the windows. The paperwork from that long week of bereavement is still sitting on the desk. The medicine bottles are still waiting. The technical distraction vanishes instantly, and the silence rushes back in with an absolute vengeance.

That is where the real timeline of my grief begins—not during the busy hours, but in the spaces between the routine I love and the empty chair I cannot ignore.

Facing the Shadows: Health, Loneliness, and the Fire of Anger

When my foundation is rocked by a loss this massive, every other hidden vulnerability in my life suddenly feels incredibly fragile. Grief pulls old, quiet anxieties out of the dark corners, turns the volume all the way up, and forces me to look them right in the eye.

1. The Physical Toll of Sorrow (And the Fire of Anger)

We talk about grief as a mental or emotional battle, but the truth is it lives deeply in the bone. For me, the emotional crash immediately collided with physical vulnerabilities I’ve been fighting since 2020—the chronic posture issues, the intense alignment pain from years of desk work, and a state of total physical depletion. But the real shift—the moment the sadness turned into something else entirely—happened when I had to go through her things and handle the physical wreckage left behind.

I found myself staring into her computer screen, looking at one of her five different email inboxes, seeing the endless doctor’s appointments she had completely avoided. Then I saw the medical records—records that just stopped completely in 2025. And then came the medicine bottles. So many bottles, stacked up like a monument to neglect. I saw that she was actively using pills she shouldn’t have been using, and flat-out refusing to take the vital ones she actually needed to stay alive.

She smoked heavily. She drank. She lived as a hoarder, buried in the clutter of her own secrets. She let herself go completely, and she intentionally hid the reality from me because she knew I loved her enough to get on her case about it.

To be completely honest, I am angry with her over this. I am so fucking angry. She had a stroke in August of 2025. Anyone will tell you that people can come back from a stroke if they actually try, if they make the effort, and if they choose to fight. She could have bounced back. She could have avoided all of this entirely just by living differently, by choosing a better situation, by taking the right medications, and refusing to give up on her own life.

And the part that cuts the deepest? It didn’t have to be this way. Her own mother—my grandmother—lived to be 93. Her grandmother lived to be 93. Her aunt lived to be 102. The genetics for a long, vibrant, stubborn life were right there in her bloodline. It was in her DNA to last. Come on now. What the fuck happened??

Looking at the evidence of how she chose to live and how she chose to exit this world broke my heart, but it also lit a fierce, non-negotiable fire under me. I refuse to be like that.

2. The Isolation of an Unshared Path (And the Fear of the Void)

Loneliness during grief is a unique, complicated beast. I share a beautiful home with an incredibly supportive partner—Ronnie has been my absolute rock through every single second of this nightmare—and I am surrounded by love, yet I can still sit in this house and feel entirely isolated.

Grief is an intensely solitary journey because no one else on this planet had the exact relationship I lost. Ronnie can hold my hand, he can support me, and he can build a future with me, but he cannot carry the weight of my mother’s absence. Nobody can. Facing a future without the person who held the absolute blueprint to my past makes me feel completely untethered at times, even while sitting right next to the person I love most.

But if I am being completely, brutally honest, the loneliness goes so much deeper than that. It stretches out into a terrifying fear of my own future.

I hate to say it, but I look at my life out here in Tucson and realize I’ve been living a lot like she did. I don’t hoard, thank Gods and Goddesses, but the isolation is identical. And the people around me? The truth is, I don’t have friends out here. The only friend I actually had turned out to be a total parasite—someone who was completely one-sided, a constant mooch who just drained my energy, took my giving for granted, and offered absolutely nothing in return. We are completely done and no longer speaking, leaving me with a totally blank slate. No local circle. No tight-knit crew.

And the part that terrifies me is looking back and realizing my mom was surrounded by those exact same kinds of people. She had the users, the mooches, the toxic takers who bled her energy dry while she let herself slide into isolation and hoarding.

When I see that cycle trying to replicate itself in my own life, my anxiety screams at me. It makes me want to drop the walls and fiercely pursue making real friends—but absolutely not at the cost of my integrity, my finances, or my happiness. I am completely done paying a premium just to have people in my space.

Which is exactly why I am seriously thinking about moving. The reality is that Arizona people, and Tucson people specifically, just are not friendly. The data actually backs up exactly what I’ve been feeling on the ground—Tucson consistently ranks near the bottom for community care and social metrics compared to other cities in the state. It’s a transient desert, and it breeds a transient, closed-off culture. I find myself constantly thinking that a smaller town would be better—a place where the roots run deeper, where people actually see each other, and where community isn’t an exhausting uphill battle.

The ultimate dread hits me in the dead of night when I look at the map: Am I going to end up stuck here? Am I going to face failing health with no real support system out here? Am I going to die alone in this desert because I let the local environment close me in?

I don’t want that script. I refuse it. I don’t just want random bodies around me to fill the silence, and I sure as hell won’t allow mooches back into my space.

I want a circle—a real, true, authentic circle. I want a sisterhood of women who protect each other’s energy instead of stealing from it. Woven into my witchcraft is the knowledge that community is power, and right now, I am putting out the call to manifest a true coven of real friends who see me, respect me, and stand ground with me.

And I want that connection for Ronnie and me as a team, too. I want us to find our people—real, genuine couples we can connect with, share dinners with, and just have fun with. I want a life where we can open our doors to friends who actually bring joy into our home, instead of draining it. We deserve a community that fuels us both. No one is going to anchor this life with Ronnie but me, and I am choosing to build it on real foundations, even if that means shifting the geography to find it.

Recognizing that I’ve been living in isolation is a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s also the moment the cage breaks. I am choosing to stop hiding.

3. The Paralysis of “What’s Next?” (And the Heavy Blank Canvas)

When a major pillar of my life is violently removed, my future entirely loses its shape. The plans I held, the expectations I had, and the daily rhythms I relied on are suddenly called into question.

This uncertainty breeds a profound, suffocating fear of the unknown. It is terrifying to look at a blank canvas when I didn’t ask to start over in the first place. I find myself staring at the wall at 2:30 PM the exact second my training shift ends, frozen in my chair, completely unable to move. The adrenaline from troubleshooting databases completely vanishes, and I am just left with the silence of the afternoon.

The fear of being left behind, the fear of my health failing like hers did, or the fear of this isolation becoming a permanent state of being causes a total, crushing mental paralysis.

I look forward and I don’t see a clear path anymore. I see a void. I start thinking about the career I am trying to build, the terrifying responsibility of having to manually design a new future from scratch because the old one was stolen from me, and the reality that no one is anchoring this life with Ronnie but me. I am the one who has to hold the line. I am the one who has to keep the foundation steady.

Worrying about whether I have the strength to do that makes me feel like an imposter in my own skin. I wonder how I am supposed to keep my focus sharp, how I am supposed to log back on at 6:00 AM the next morning, and how I am supposed to rebuild a life when the ground beneath me still feels like shifting sand.

It is the feeling of being completely stuck in place, watching the world move forward outside my windows while I am trapped inside the echo chamber of my own grief and anxiety.

Rebuilding One Intentional Step at a Time

So, how do I build a life on a foundation that feels like shifting sand? I cannot and will not do it all at once. It’s simply not possible. When the canvas is completely blank and the ground is shifting, trying to force a massive, overnight transformation is a trap that only leads right back to paralysis. Rebuilding isn’t about an instant overhaul; it’s about learning to carry the weight of what I lost while slowly, deliberately making room for new, intentional growth.

For me, it’s not a generic checklist. It’s a radical act of rebellion. It’s a declaration that I am taking my power back from the statistics.

To truly talk about getting up off our asses and choosing to live, I have to be completely honest about what that looks like in the mirror. I am 5 feet tall, 178 pounds, and I carry a curvy, hourglass build.

When I am short and compact with a heavy, hourglass silhouette, gravity hits differently. The chronic posture issues and alignment pain I’ve been fighting since 2020 are the literal physical weight of carrying a full, curvy body on a five-foot frame while sitting in an office chair during a high-focus tech shift. If I let myself go, if I sit in the stagnation and the clutter like my mom did, my body will pay the price fast. Stagnation is the enemy of a short, curvy frame. It settles into the lower back, pulls the shoulders forward, and locks up the hips.

So, reclaiming my health means making this specific, curvy frame fiercely functional, agile, and resilient.

It looks like walking into a doctor’s office and realizing that my health insurance is a tool that works for me, not a system to be avoided. It looks like finally using that system to aggressively treat the posture and alignment issues from the last six years, and adjusting my workspace so that my desk, my monitors, and my chair support my height and my curves instead of crushing my spine. It looks like pulling the data on my own bloodwork, looking at my health with the same sharp, analytical mind I use for tech support databases, and keeping my muscles strong so I can carry my weight with absolute ease and vitality.

It looks like practical sorcery. As a witch, I know my body is my altar. Taking care of it means keeping my physical space clean, intentional, and entirely mine—the absolute opposite of the hoarding and chaos that swallowed my mom. It looks like the grounding ritual of my 6:00 AM coffee before the world wakes up. It looks like stepping out onto the patio at 2:30 PM to tend to my miniature roses and get my hands in the dirt. It looks like watching my ferrets slide across the floor of their dedicated room, choosing to surround myself with life, movement, and uncomplicated joy.

Most of all, it looks like claiming my birthright. My grandmother lived to 93. My great-grandmother lived to 93. My great-aunt lived to be 102. That resilient, stubborn blood is running through my veins right now. Every time I stretch out my spine, every time I schedule an appointment, every time I choose longevity over neglect, I am honoring the women who came before me and rewriting the ending my mother chose. When I look at my 5’0” frame in the mirror, I don’t see a statistic. I see a solid, powerful build designed to last a century.

Bright Life, Deep Roots: The Premonition in the Soil

Before any of this darkness hit, when I sat at my desk migrating this entire site from Blogger, meticulously designing the colors and choosing the branding for Vividly Rae, I picked a tagline: Bright Life, Deep Roots. I thought I was just being poetic. I thought I was just choosing a pretty phrase that sounded grounded.

I didn’t realize it then, but those four words were a quiet, echoing premonition whispered by the ancestors. They were a map laid out by the Gods and Goddesses for exactly what I would need to survive this devastating chapter.

Because when the sky falls, you learn what your roots are actually made of. The grief over losing my mom doesn’t just vanish; it doesn’t shrink, and it doesn’t get lighter. But I am realizing that I don’t need it to. I can build a bigger life completely around it. I can expand my own territory, stretching my branches wide enough to hold the heavy weight of what I lost while making a sharper, more fierce appreciation for the vibrant, beautiful things that still remain under my roof. The grief stays the same size, but I am choosing to grow massive.

To every woman currently sitting in the frozen, suffocating dark of a personal winter—and most especially to those of you who are in your 50s and beyond, feeling the terrifying pressure of the years and wondering if you have the strength to start over on a blank canvas: listen to me. The ground beneath us is still holding. The soil hasn’t given up on us. The roots are still down there, buried deep in the black, holding onto the ancient knowledge of how to endure, just waiting for the right cosmic shift to climb back up toward the light.

Do not let the stagnation win. Do not let the shadows convince you to hide. Get up off your ass. Use every single tool you have available to you. Pull your data, claim your space, and do the hard, necessary work that preserves your youth, protects your strength, and keeps your fire vibrant.

Taking care of ourselves, fighting for our vitality, and fiercely guarding our spaces from the parasites is not a chore—it is a radical act of pure survival, a holy reclamation of our bodies, and a conscious choice to live out loud in a world that wants us quiet. Take your time. Protect your energy with everything you have. Remember that rebuilding a life from the bedrock doesn’t require a massive, terrifying leap into the void—it just requires the quiet, stubborn courage to take the next single, earth-shaking step.

How are you navigating your own timeline of loss? What small, daily rhythms are keeping you grounded today? Let’s talk about it in the comments below.