The Q life Grief Journey

Grief has many shapes, anger, sorrow, memory, longing, but one of its heaviest forms is loneliness. Not the kind cured by company or conversation, but a loneliness that settles into the places where your loved one used to be. A loneliness that follows you into every room. One that lingers even when you’re surrounded by people who care.

Losing Quinten has brought a silence into my life that I never expected. A silence that isn’t just the absence of sound, but the absence of him, his voice, his footsteps, his laughter, his hugs. The quiet where his presence used to live is sometimes the loudest thing in the room.

And the loneliness cuts even deeper because for two years, James and I took care of Quinten every single day.
We weren’t just his parents; we became his full-time caregivers.
His advocates.
His comfort.
His constant.

Every morning, every night, every appointment, every surgery, every medication, every hope, every setback, we were there. Our lives revolved around keeping him going, keeping him safe, keeping him loved. Caring for him became part of the rhythm of our days, the structure of our home, the beat our hearts moved to.

To go from that level of closeness, that level of purpose, that level of commitment… to nothing is a loneliness unlike anything I’ve ever known.

People can sit beside you.
They can listen, they can comfort, they can hug you.
And I am grateful for every single one of them.

But none of them can fill the space Quinten left.
None of them can step into the shape of the relationship that only he and I had, the kind that comes from raising a child and then walking beside him as he leaves this world.

Grief is lonely because it is personal.
Everyone loved Quinten in their own way, but no one loved him the way I did as his mother.
And no one walked those final years the way James and I did, shoulder to shoulder with him, carrying the weight, the fear, the hope, and the heartbreak.

The loneliness of grief shows up in unexpected moments when the day grows quiet, when the chores are done, when the sun goes down, and the house settles, when I reach for my phone to tell him something small or silly, and then remember I can’t.

It’s in the empty couch, the unmade plans, the Saturdays, the meals, the caregiving routines that no longer have a purpose. The medications that don’t need setting up. The appointments that don’t need scheduling.
The tasks that used to fill my hands now leave them empty.

Some days I feel surrounded by love from my family, my grandbabies, my friends, and still, there is a part of me that is alone, because the person I cared for with my whole heart is no longer here to care for.

That is the quiet loneliness no one warns you about, the loss of a role that I gave everything to.

Yet even in that loneliness, there is something tender, too. Because the ache is born from love, 
the kind of love that cares, protects, sacrifices, and never once regrets it.

The same love that made me his mother.
The same love that held him through life.
The same love that held him as he left this world.

A mother’s grief is a room inside you, a room that stays. Some days, the door is wide open, and the ache floods in. Other days, it is softer, quieter, a place where memory sits gently beside you.

I don’t expect the loneliness to disappear.
But I do hope it will soften.
That someday it will feel less like emptiness and more like a quiet space where I can sit with him in memory, feeling not only what I’ve lost, but what I was blessed to love so fiercely.

Grief can be lonely.
But his love is still here.
And even in the silence he left behind,
I am never truly alone.