I became an adult orphan at the ripe age of 32. I lost my mom on February 24, 2020, a few months before I turned 30. Ironically my birthday that year was on Mother’s Day – sucker punch from life I guess. I remember wanting the world to stop so it could grieve with me. Strangely enough, a few weeks later it did stop. Just not for me. For COVID. The pandemic closed restaurants, canceled gatherings, emptied airports, and separated families. Everyone suddenly learned words like quarantine and social distancing and people talked endlessly about isolation. But I had already entered an isolation of my own – grief.

Losing a parent can make you very uniquely lonely. When my mom died, I didn’t just lose my mother. I lost my best friend, my confidant, my history, and a version of me that was held together, in part, simply by her being alive. She was the one person in this world for whom my existence was woven into the fabric of her own from the very beginning. With her died the remnants of the family I once knew. With her died my visions and dreams I had quietly assumed belonged to my future. The wedding dress shopping. The grandkids I hoped to one day have her watch. The late nights sipping on wine and reminiscing about the past. The conversations I thought we still had time for. The ordinary moments when I could call her, hear her voice, and feel, even for a second, like I still belonged to the life I came from. And if that wasn’t enough, on October 16, 2022, I lost my dad. 

Orphanhood as an adult feels so strange. Technically I don’t need my parents anymore. I am able to pay my own bills, buy my own groceries, handle emergencies, raise my own family. But I’ve had to learn to function in a world where people who had existed for my entire existence suddenly don’t. And that has redefined loneliness for me. Before I knew grief, loneliness was having no one to go out with on a Friday night. Now, loneliness is missing the versions of me that no longer exist anywhere but inside me. My parents held memories of me that died with them. They probably knew what my temperament was like as a baby. They probably remembered when I first crawled, walked or talked. They probably knew stories that I have forgotten or stories I was too young to even register as memories. They were the living archive of my life. What are we really, if not a collection of memories? And what happens when the witnesses to those memories are no longer here? Surely, there typically is some memorabilia – photographs, childhood belongings, old letters, boxes tucked away in an attic – pieces of a life that can help you reconstruct where you came from. I don’t even have this much because moving across the world 21 years ago meant leaving behind almost everything that once meant something. A whole childhood reduced to whatever could cross an ocean with us, whatever survived the years that followed, and whatever remains inside my own increasingly imperfect memory. 

When my parents died, I didn’t only lose them. I lost the two people who had been there from the very beginning – the keepers of the years before my own memory began, and the strongest bridges back to the world I came from. My brothers of course remember pieces of that world, too. We share a childhood, a family, an immigration story, and losses that no one outside of us can ever fully share. But adulthood has scattered even what remains. One brother has become estranged, his life now largely unknown to me. One brother is geographically closer than we have been in years, but consumed – as we all are – in the demands of his own family and his own life. 

Many of the friends and acquaintances I once had, people who belonged to my life before loss, have gradually dissipated and I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it was the pandemic, which pushed people so far away from one another in ways that went well beyond physical distance. Differing ideas about safety and politics created divides. Physical distance became harder to overcome. People retreated to their closest circles. Or maybe there was simply a kind of social fatigue, where even finding the mental energy to initiate another virtual or masked interaction became one more hurdle. Maybe losing my mom impaired me more than I understood it at the time. Maybe I no longer knew how to be the person I had once been, or how to return to those same relationships as someone who no longer felt like her – because how do you step back into an old relationship when the version of you who belonged there doesn’t exist anymore? Or maybe part of it was intentional, too. Somewhere along the way, I decided I needed to rebuild myself and perhaps rebuilding felt easier with a clean slate. I don’t know. Maybe there is no singular explanation. But maybe this is another strange dimension of grief – losing people to death makes you painfully aware of all the other ways we can lose people who are still alive. Distance. Estrangement. Marriage. Parenthood. Busyness. Separate lives quietly growing around us. The people who share at least a part of my story still exist but sharing a history is not the same as sharing a life. And maybe this is another one of the greatest griefs – you don’t only mourn the people who died. You mourn everything that died with them and sometimes, the closeness you thought would remain among those left behind. 

And because we don’t live in a lab bubble where normally only one variable changes to measure an outcome, somewhere along the way I fully adulted – finished my graduate degrees, got a job, built a family. And sometimes I wonder how much of myself I lost to grief and how much simply to adulthood, especially motherhood. There is only so much capacity that a person can have and motherhood has a remarkable way of consuming nearly all of it. Grief doesn’t politely wait while I prepare meals, answer the same question for the nth time, regulate little people’s emotions while trying to control my own, plan birthdays, schedule wellness appointments, or scare away skeletons and t-rexes. I love being their mom. But that doesn’t make it easy. It simply keeps me going, no matter how depleted I am. With no one to turn to for any real support. I think the worst part of all of this is that at the same time that I am responsible for creating someone else’s sense of home, I have completely lost my own. 

Home. What a strange concept. What does it even mean? Is it a place? A country? A house? The people waiting inside it? For much of my life, perhaps I never had to think about defining it. It was simply wherever my parents were. It was familiarity. History. Belonging. The place where I didn’t need to explain how I became the person I became because the people around me witnessed it happen. We immigrated and left one home behind. My parents died and another home disappeared with them. Friendships faded. Family relationships changed. People scattered into marriages, parenthood, careers, responsibilities, and lives of their own. And still, I kept believing that home was something I might find again. 

I have moved enough times in my life to know that starting over sounds far more romantic than it actually is. There is excitement in a new place. New roads, new restaurants, new possibilities. But there is also the exhausting reality of having no history there. Friendships in adulthood are strangely difficult. Everyone has children, marriages, careers, aging parents, appointments, obligations, illnesses, vacations, renovations, crises, and routines. No one necessarily means to disappear. They are simply living their lives. 

Colorado was home for so long, but wanting to be closer to the only link to my past – my brother – we moved to Michigan. I think a part of me believed that I was moving toward something, that maybe this would feel like home again. Not merely another state and another house, but a village, people nearby, family connections, casual dinners, people who knew the ordinary details of our lives because they were actually present for them. I had painted an idealistic picture in my mind of what life here would look like but the reality has been much quieter. Maybe I expected too much. But maybe I mistook proximity for presence. Maybe I thought physical proximity would create emotional proximity. But truth is, everyone is just living their own lives. With their own families, responsibilities, schedules, problems I know nothing about. I am consumed by my own life, too. The hard truth is that people can love you and still be mostly absent from your life. I know their absence isn’t rejection, but understanding it doesn’t make the absence feel less absent or lonely. 

Sometimes loneliness isn’t having nobody. Sometimes loneliness is having people on paper. Names in your phone. Family within driving distance. Friends you know care about you. People who would say, sincerely, Call me if you need anything. And yet very few people who are actually woven into the ordinary fabric of your days. Because “call me if you need anything” is not the same thing as presence. Presence is knowing you don’t have to call. It is someone noticing. Someone showing up. Someone sitting at your kitchen table while nothing particularly important happens. Someone who knows that you’ve had a terrible week without needing the entire backstory. Someone whose children know where the snacks are in your pantry. Someone who doesn’t need an invitation into every corner of your life because somewhere along the way they became part of it. And I long for that.

Lately I have found myself thinking something uncomfortable: No one actually cares that much about what you’re going through. Everyone has their own life to live. It sounds cynical. Maybe it is. But there is some truth buried inside it. The world does not reorganize itself around our suffering. People may care deeply and still go home. They may worry about us and then get distracted by dinner. They may genuinely intend to call and forget. They may love us and still not understand what we need. Eventually everyone returns to the center of their own life. Maybe adulthood is partly learning to accept that. But I don’t think the lesson is that nobody cares. I think the harder lesson is that caring and showing up are not the same thing. Someone can care about you from a distance. Someone can love you and rarely call. Someone can think about you without telling you. Someone can assume you’re doing fine because you appear capable. And perhaps those things count for something. But human beings cannot live entirely on theoretical love. We need presence. We need community. We need people who participate.

For years, I think I have been waiting to simply find my village. Maybe I imagined that eventually I would move to the right place and discover it waiting for me. The right neighborhood, the right church, the right group of friends, the right community. Suddenly life would feel connected again. I’m smart enough to know that villages do not simply appear. They are built. Painfully slowly. One invitation, one awkward conversation, one dinner, one person brave enough to say, Come over even though my house is a disaster, one friendship surviving inconvenience, one person choosing to show up when it would be easier not to. Maybe that is where I am now. Not at the end of loneliness. But at the realization that I cannot keep waiting for someone else to rescue me from it. I cannot recreate my mother. I cannot recreate my father. I cannot recover the years COVID swallowed. I cannot force people I love to have more room in their lives for me. I cannot manufacture the village I imagined Michigan would give me. But perhaps I can begin building something different. Not as a replacement because nothing replaces people. But as something new. Maybe I can invite people even when I’m afraid they will say no. Maybe I can be the person who checks in. Maybe I can allow friendships to develop slowly instead of measuring them against relationships that took decades to build. Maybe I can stop interpreting everyone’s busyness as evidence that I don’t matter. And maybe I can also acknowledge something else: I am lonely. Not ungrateful. Not unloved. Lonely. Those things can coexist. Perhaps loneliness does not always mean that something is wrong with us. Sometimes it is simply the distance between the connection we have and the connection we long for.

Looking back, I don’t think any one of these things alone explains what happened to me. There was no single moment when I stopped feeling like myself. Life simply kept taking. And life kept asking. Grief took my parents. Immigration had already taken much of the physical evidence of my childhood. COVID took connection at precisely the time I needed it most. Motherhood has taken an enormous amount of time, energy, freedom, and mental space – not maliciously, but inevitably. And somewhere among all that taking, I became extraordinarily good at functioning. But functioning and living are not the same thing. 

I often think about the person I used to be and wonder where she went. She was so carefree. She was fearless and she shined so bright. She dreamed big and loved deeply. She danced to the beat of her own drum. And suddenly, she wasn’t any of these things anymore. Did she get lost to grief? Did she disappear into family life or adulthood? Is she even still there, beneath all the rubble of responsibilities and losses waiting for enough space to emerge again? I don’t know. What I do know is that grief has not only been sadness and loneliness, but it has also been an impairment of capacity. Capacity to reach out. To maintain friendship. To tolerate disappointment. To dream. To be present in the moment. To feel excitement. Or even joy. Perhaps that is what the grief that follows really is. It isn’t simply learning to live without the people you lost, but slowly discovering all the ways their absence reshaped the landscape of your life. It keeps introducing itself into places you never expected. Sometimes even years later. Sometimes quietly enough that you don’t even recognize it until one day you realize you have been mourning pieces of yourself, too.