Would She Be Proud of Me?

16 May

People ask me this a lot.

“What do you think Kahlia would think of all this?”

The writing.
The advocacy.
The speaking.
The way my entire life now seems to orbit grief and suicide and love and survival.

And I usually give the same answer. I say, “She would expect me to be doing this work.” Because honestly? She probably would.

Kahlia knew me. She knew I was someone who threw myself into things with my whole heart. She knew I couldn’t look away from pain once I’d seen it properly. She knew I would want to make meaning from devastation, not because meaning fixes it, but because doing nothing would destroy me.

So yes. Ithink she would expect this version of me.

But underneath that answer is another one. A quieter one, a more desperate one.

I want her to be proud of me. Not in a big public way. Not because of followers or books or interviews or any of that. I just want her to think I’ve done okay.

I want her to see me getting up each day and understand how hard that actually is.

I want her to know that some mornings still feel impossible.
That I carry her into every room.
That there are days my chest physically aches from missing her.

I want her to know that my heart did not “heal”.

It broke. And it is still broken.

People talk about grief like it slowly moves away from the centre of your life.

Mine didn’t. She is still the centre of everything. Not always loudly, not always visibly; but structurally.

Like the beam that holds a house up, even after it’s cracked.

Everything I do now runs through the fact that she died.

The work.
The writing.
The way I see people.
The way I understand pain.
The way I notice loneliness in strangers.

Nothing escaped it. And maybe that’s part of why I keep doing this work. Because it keeps her close. That’s the truth underneath all of it.

Not strategy.
Not branding.
Not ambition.

Proximity.

Every time I write about suicide honestly, I am refusing to let her disappear into silence.

Every time someone messages me saying, “I thought I was the only one,” I feel like her life is still rippling outward somehow.

Not redeemed. Never worth it, but still moving.

Still touching people.

Still mattering.

I wonder sometimes if she would feel guilty. If she would see the exhaustion in me and wish I could put this down. And that thought destroys me a little, because I never want her to carry responsibility for my grief.

This isn’t her fault. It’s the aftermath of losing someone I loved beyond language.

I also wonder if she’d recognise me now.

Grief changes you in strange ways.

Some parts of me became sharper.
Some softer.
Some disappeared entirely.

There are versions of me that died with her too.

The uncomplicated version.
The naive version.
The version that believed life was fundamentally safe.

But I hope she would still see me in here somewhere. Trying. Loving. Continuing.

Even badly, sometimes. Because that’s another truth people don’t say enough.

Surviving grief is not graceful.

Some days survival looks meaningful.
Some days it looks like forgetting to reply to messages, crying in the supermarket, running on caffeine and exhaustion, or sitting in your car because going inside feels too hard.

And still, somehow, you keep going.

I want her to know that. That I didn’t stop loving her just because the world kept moving.

That I still say her name.
Still ache for her.
Still reach for her in my mind dozens of times a day.

That she is still woven through my ordinary life in a thousand invisible ways. And maybe that’s what this question is really about.