Finding Purpose After Loss

The Cost of Purpose After Loss

I sat with Eleanor in her sunroom the week before she died. She held my hand, her skin like tissue paper, and whispered, “I miss the lightness.” Not the pain of loss, but the lightness of not having to carry it. That’s the cost I’m learning to name: purpose after loss isn’t free. It costs you the ease of forgetting.

Here’s what I’ve learned: finding meaning in grief isn’t about replacing what’s broken. It’s about building something new on top of the brokenness. And it costs. It costs the quiet comfort of pretending the world is still whole. It costs the ability to laugh without the shadow of absence hovering just behind the sound. I traded the lightness of forgetting for the weight of remembering.

What did I gain? A deeper, quieter empathy. I see the unspoken grief in a friend’s eyes when they say “I’m fine.” I hear the unspoken question in a stranger’s voice at a coffee shop. I stopped rushing to fix sorrow and started sitting with it. I learned that purpose isn’t a grand gesture—it’s showing up, hand in hand, in the sunroom of someone else’s ending. It’s the sacredness in the ordinary: the way a dog rests its head on your knee after a hard day, or the silence shared over a cup of tea when words fail.

But the trade-off is real. I gave up the simple joy of not having to think about loss. I gave up the illusion that I could ever be “over” it. The purpose I found requires me to carry the weight, not just for myself, but for others who are still walking that path. It’s not a burden I’d undo, but it’s not a burden I’d wish on anyone else, either.

Was it worth it? I don’t know. Some days, the weight feels like too much. But other days, sitting with a widow’s hands in the sun, I feel the truth: purpose isn’t found in escaping the cost. It’s found in the quiet, stubborn act of showing up with it. It’s okay to not be okay. It’s okay to feel the weight. What if we just... sat with that for a moment?

— Kyle Smith, sitting with what's hard