Tiny Big Wins

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love.
It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot.
All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes,
the lump in your throat,
and in that hollow part of your chest.
Grief is just love with no place to go.”
― Jamie Anderson

When I first stumbled across this quote on Goodreads (“Grief is love with no place to go” ) I stopped and read it again. And again.

It turns out it’s a famous line, passed around quietly in corners of the Internet where people are trying to make sense of loss. Still, it felt as if someone had finally translated an emotion I had been carrying around without words since November of 2022.

Grief is not just sadness. It’s love that has lost its direction — the unfinished movement of affection that no longer knows where to land. For me, it’s the echo of love for our most perfect firstborn child that once had a home with Sung and me, and now, somehow, lives everywhere and nowhere at once.

What I am learning, slowly and haltingly, is that grief is the price we pay for connection. The deeper we love, the deeper we grieve. To mourn is to be brave enough to keep that door open, even when the person we love has stepped through it.

Love doesn’t die. In its truest sense, it’s eternal. What we feel as grief isn’t the absence of love, but its persistence — a steady heartbeat that refuses to fade. Our tears are prayers in motion, proof that the bond still exists, just in another form.

Every day, I’m trying to find small, tiny ways to give that love somewhere to go. To Aaron — in the form of fiercer, deeper, unconditional love. To Rook and Butters — who had never known tenderness before and now receive it in abundance. To Sung — who carries his own version of this love alongside me.

I’m longing to make this love move again — into a new memory, into daily kindness, into something gentle and meaningful, something that can ripple outward into small kindnesses and quiet wins, and most importantly, moments of beauty that honor Collin.

Because love was never meant to disappear.

And because that is what Collin would want me to do.