The Undertow of Grief

When the Wave Pulls You Under Again

There comes a point in grief where the world begins to believe you’re okay, and maybe you do too.

Not because the loss has gone anywhere, but because you’ve learned how to live beside it.

You’re Showing up.
Speaking in rooms.
Writing.
Building things.

Of course you still miss them. Everyone understands that part. But it starts to feel like something quieter, something folded into the background of your life.

You have a new normal.

You function.
You cope.
You’re predictable again.

And people feel relieved by that.

They don’t have to walk quite so carefully around you anymore. They don’t have to worry as much about saying the wrong thing or watching you crumble.

Your grief becomes something steady, something they can understand.

And in many ways, it’s true.

You do find your footing again.

You build routines around the absence. You learn how to laugh without immediately feeling guilty. You can sit in a room and talk about your person without breaking apart every time.

Life begins to move again.

And then something happens out of no where that pulls you straight back under.

This week that happened to me.

I received the coroner’s report.

Twenty-two months after Kahlia died.

Twenty-two months of learning how to live in the aftermath of losing your child. Twenty-two months of building work around the love that didn’t disappear.

And suddenly a document arrives that drags you straight back to the beginning.

Back to the day your world split open.

Back to the brutal reality that my daughter died and I could not stop it.

Grief doesn’t move forward in the tidy way people imagine.

It circles.
It dips.
It waits.

Most days now, the water is calm enough that I can move through it. I can write. I can work. I can advocate. I can stand in a room and speak about Kahlia’s life.

The book launched recently. People came. They listened. They held her story with care.

From the outside it probably looked like strength.
And in many ways, it was.

But grief has an undertow.

Sometimes it sits quietly beneath the surface. Sometimes it reaches up without warning and pulls you straight back into the depth of it.

That’s what this week has felt like.

The heaviness in my body.
The exhaustion that doesn’t lift with sleep.

And the sentence that still lands like a stone in my chest:

I couldn’t save her.

It doesn’t arrive gently.

It arrives like a punch of reality that the body still hasn’t learned how to absorb.

For a moment everything collapses back to that single truth.

My daughter died.
And I couldn’t stop it.

No amount of love, vigilance, research, therapy appointments, late-night conversations or desperate hoping could change that ending.

People sometimes think the hardest part of grief is the missing.

But for parents, there is another layer that sits underneath it.

The instinct that was built into your body the moment they were born.

Protect them.
Keep them safe.
Make sure they survive.

When your child dies, that instinct has nowhere to go.

It keeps firing anyway.

And sometimes something; a document, a memory, a quiet moment when the noise of life settles - brings it roaring back.

Your body asks the same question it asked in the beginning.

How did this happen?

How could I not have stopped it?

And even when your mind knows the complexity of suicide, even when you understand the layers of pain your child was carrying, the parent part of you still whispers the same impossible wish.

If only love had been enough.

That’s the place grief can pull you back to.

Not the early chaos.
Not the funeral.

But that unbearable collision between love and powerlessness.

And it still hurts.

This is the part of grief people don’t always see.

The way you can be functioning, working, even building something meaningful in your child’s name, and still be pulled straight back into the moment you realised you couldn’t protect them.

It doesn’t mean you’ve gone backwards.

It means love like this never becomes tidy.

Some weeks the ocean is calm.

Some weeks a wave reminds you just how deep it still is.

And all you can do is let it pass through your body, breathe when you can, and remember that surviving the wave doesn’t mean the love has faded.

It means it’s still there.