When Love Teaches You How to Begin Again

I was thirty-three years old when my world split in two — when I went from being a wife to being a widow, from “we” to “me,” from planning a lifetime with my best friend to explaining heaven to a seven-year-old little girl who just wanted her daddy back.

Grief doesn’t come with instructions. It just arrives — uninvited, heavy, and relentless. In those early days, I remember wondering how something that once felt so full could suddenly feel so hollow. I remember the silence in the house after everyone went home, and how even the walls seemed to ache with the memories.

And yet… beneath all of that pain, something sacred was happening.

You see, grief is the byproduct of love — the proof that we dared to love deeply enough that its absence leaves an echo. The only reason it hurts this much is because it mattered that much.

For a long time, I couldn’t imagine opening my heart again. It felt disloyal somehow — like love was a one-time gift I had already spent. But over the years, I’ve learned something beautiful about the way our Creator works: when we think our hearts are too shattered to hold anything more, He gently shows us that He can make more space.

He stretches what’s left of our hearts in the direction of healing, not by erasing the love we lost, but by expanding the space where love can live.

Because the love I have for Kurt didn’t end on October 22, 2017. It still breathes in the way I see the world, in the way I raise our daughter, in the way I show up for others. It’s the echo that reminds me that the story didn’t stop — it simply changed shape.

And that’s the awe-inspiring thing about God — He takes what we think is the end, and somehow turns it into a beginning. He opens doors where we only saw walls. He takes our grief and grows it into grace.

So, yes, I could never have fathomed that this would be my story — this life I didn’t plan, this ache I didn’t ask for. But I also couldn’t fathom not having loved Kurt with the magnitude that I did. Because love like that, even when it breaks your heart, still changes everything.

Now, when I sit on my porch and look back at all that’s happened, I see a woman who has been broken and rebuilt, emptied and refilled, shattered and yet somehow still shining.

And maybe that’s what it really means to live — to keep your heart open, even when it’s been broken. To trust that God can create something beautiful in the empty spaces. To keep loving, even when you know how much it can cost.

Because this is it — the life we get. The love we carry. The faith that steadies us.

And I’m learning, one breath at a time, to live it well.

— Carrie