Yesterday caught me completely off guard.

Nothing bad happened. Nobody upset me. No catastrophic email landed in my inbox. No government agency sent me on a three-hour scavenger hunt through seventeen dropdown menus and a forgotten password from 1998. It was a perfectly ordinary day. Yet somewhere in the middle of that ordinary day, a wave of sadness rolled in and made itself comfortable.

Rude.

Years ago, I probably would have tried to distract myself. Stay busy. Clean something. Organize a drawer. Reorganize the same drawer because apparently the first organization wasn't emotionally effective. These days, I've learned that emotions usually know something before I do. So instead of arguing with the feeling, I got curious.

As I sat with it, I realized I was thinking about Mo.

My buddy.

My shadow.

My faithful sidekick.

It's been over a year since he left this physical world, and most days I'm genuinely okay. I smile when I think about him. I tell stories about him. Sometimes I still talk to him. If that sounds strange to you, you probably haven't met me. Or owned a dog. Or both.

The interesting thing is that I don't spend much time wondering where he is. As a coach and QHHT® practitioner, I've spent years exploring healing, consciousness, purpose, and the bigger questions surrounding this human experience. Through my own journey and the journeys of the people I've been privileged to work with, I've come to believe that our story doesn't end when our body does.

I know Mo is okay.

I know he's around.

I know love doesn't disappear.

What surprised me yesterday was realizing that I wasn't missing his spirit.

I was missing his nose.

His paws.

His fur.

The way he would quietly lean against me as if his full-time job description was "Professional Support System."

I missed the warmth of him stretched out beside me. I missed reaching down and finding him there. I missed all the little physical moments that seemed so ordinary while they were happening and somehow became priceless the moment they weren't.

As I sat there thinking about him, Gandalf wandered through the room looking mildly offended by something only he could see. A few minutes later, Zafira launched herself off a piece of furniture with the confidence of someone who has never once considered gravity a legitimate concern.

I laughed.

I adore those two little weirdos.

They've brought joy, laughter, companionship, and occasional property damage back into our lives. Their purrs, cuddles, and midnight zoomies have filled spaces that felt painfully empty after Mo passed.

Yet even while watching them, I realized something.

Love doesn't replace love.

It doesn't work that way.

Nobody replaces anybody.

The heart simply gets bigger.

It somehow finds room for the ones who are here, the ones who have left, the ones we miss, and the ones who arrive later carrying their own unique kind of magic.

Somewhere between missing Mo and watching feline nonsense unfold in my office, my thoughts took a turn I never saw coming.

I found myself thinking about my childhood.

Now that was unexpected.

I wasn't doing shadow work.

I wasn't digging through old memories.

I wasn't sitting there trying to solve my childhood before dinner.

I was missing my dog.

Yet somehow my mind wandered into territory it hadn't visited in quite this way before.

For the first time in my life, I found myself looking at my childhood through the lens of grief.

That realization stopped me cold.

I've spent years looking at my upbringing through the lens of healing, resilience, forgiveness, growth, perspective, and responsibility. I've made peace with so much of it. I've done the work. I've learned the lessons. I've found meaning in places I never expected.

Yet somehow it never occurred to me that there might be grief there too.

Because how do you grieve something you never had?

I never had the loving mother and father I longed for.

I never had parents I could run to when life hurt.

I never had the experience of feeling emotionally safe, protected, understood, and cherished in the way every child deserves.

I never had a sibling beside me sharing the journey.

For decades I've thought about those realities in terms of what they taught me and how they shaped me. Yesterday was the first time I simply felt sad for what could have been.

Not angry.

Not resentful.

Not bitter.

Just sad.

Sad for the little girl who kept hoping.

Sad for the little girl who believed that maybe next time would be different.

Sad for the version of life she imagined but never got to experience.

And perhaps what surprised me most was how peaceful that sadness felt. There was no fight attached to it. No blame. No need to make anyone wrong. Just an acknowledgment that something important had been missing.

As I sat with that realization, other forms of grief began quietly stepping forward as if they had been standing in line waiting their turn.

I found myself thinking about friendships.

Not the dramatic endings.

Not the train wrecks.

Not the relationships that crashed and burned while taking out half the neighborhood on the way down.

The quieter ones.

The people who once occupied a significant place in my life. People I laughed with until my stomach hurt. People I cried with. People I celebrated with. People who knew versions of me that no longer exist.

At one point I couldn't imagine my life without them in it.

Then life did what life does.

People changed.

I changed.

Paths diverged.

The calls became less frequent. The messages became occasional. One day turned into one month. One month turned into one year. 

Before either of us fully realized it, the chapter had ended.

The interesting thing is that I genuinely wish every one of those people well.

I hope they're happy.

I hope they're thriving.

I hope life has been kind to them.

We're all walking our own path. Sometimes people travel beside us for decades. Sometimes they only share a few miles of the journey. Neither is wrong. Looking back, I wouldn't erase any of those chapters. Well... maybe a paragraph or two. But not the whole chapter.

Understanding that doesn't remove the sadness, though.

It simply changes the shape of it.

Apparently gratitude and grief are perfectly capable of sharing the same chair.

Then, because grief apparently decided to hold a full staff meeting yesterday, my body wanted a turn too.

That realization may have surprised me most of all.

When I was younger, grief belonged to funerals. Nobody explained that one day grief might show up when your body could no longer do things it once did without a second thought.

Back then, if I wanted to do something, I simply did it.

Now there is a planning committee involved.

The committee includes knees, ankles, energy levels, pain levels, accessibility concerns, and occasionally a cat sitting on me who has voted against all movement.

There are places I'd love to explore. Adventures I'd happily sign up for. Experiences I would embrace tomorrow if my body agreed with the plan.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes it files a formal complaint.

Most days I focus on gratitude because there is so much to be grateful for. This body has carried me through nearly sixty years of lessons, adventures, surgeries, diagnoses, miracles, mistakes, wisdom, and second chances.

We've been through a lot together.

But every now and then I remember what it felt like to simply decide to do something and then go do it.

No calculations.

No negotiations.

No energy audits.

No consultations with the Board of Directors currently occupying my joints.

Just go.

There is grief in recognizing that some of those days are gone.

Not because life is over.

Not because joy is gone.

Not because possibility has disappeared.

Simply because some things have changed.

And change, even when we accept it, can still be sad.

By the end of the day, the heaviness had softened. Not because I found answers. Not because I solved anything. It softened because I listened.

What started as missing my dog somehow became a conversation about grief in all its unexpected forms.

The dog who isn't beside us anymore.

The parents we never had.

The friendships that belonged to another chapter.

The body that no longer does what it once did.

The dreams that never arrived.

The possibilities that never unfolded.

Maybe grief isn't simply about losing what was.

Maybe sometimes it's about making peace with what never was.

I don't have a profound conclusion.

No five-step formula.

No inspirational quote floating across a sunset.

I just found it interesting.

Yesterday started because I missed my dog.

It ended with me realizing I was grieving things I never even knew I was grieving.

And for someone who spends her life helping people shift perspective, that feels like a perspective worth paying attention to.

If you've been carrying a grief that doesn't fit neatly into a box, maybe this is your reminder that it still counts. Maybe it's okay to acknowledge it, sit with it, and give it a little space to breathe. And if this reflection helped you feel a little less alone in your own messy middle, I'd love for you to subscribe, share it with someone who might need it, or explore some of the other stories here.

Sometimes the greatest shifts begin with realizing we're not the only ones asking the question.

Shift happens...