Have you ever lost someone and felt like part of you died with them?
Maybe not dramatically. Maybe not all at once.
Just a quiet going-out. The heaviness that sleep doesn’t touch. The mirror showing a woman who looks older than she felt six months ago. The flatness where curiosity used to live.
That is not a metaphor. That is biology.
And something else is happening in that biology that most women don’t know to look for.
Her Chair
Two days after my mother died, I moved her chair to my house.
A white leather recliner. She had sat in it day after day for years.
I used it to imagine her arms around me.
For three weeks I grieved in that chair. And I want to say something about that grief, because it matters for what comes next.
It was clean grief. Hard and real and true. I missed her. I ached with the specific weight of 70 years of love suddenly without a body to land on. I cried. I sat in the silence. I let it move through me.
Clean grief honors what was real. It is right to grieve a loss this profound. There is nothing to fix in it, nothing to push through, nothing to spiritually bypass.
My mother deserved every tear.
But one morning, early, the sky still dark, something else arrived.
I was sitting in her chair when I started hearing a different kind of voice.
Not grief.
Something harder.
I can’t go on without her. I’m not going to make it. Why not just give up. Life is too hard. I can’t take this anymore.
The moment I recognized what it was
Something in me paused.
Wait a minute. What’s this?
I had done enough hijacker work to recognize the difference.
That voice was not my grief. It was not love. It was not even true.
It was the Decline Hijacker, the one that waits for the most vulnerable moment and moves in dressed as your own thoughts, speaking in your own voice, telling you the worst possible story about what the loss means.
I said, out loud, sitting in my mother’s chair: This is NOT true.
I miss her, yes. Profoundly. But I am fully able to go on with my life. I refuse to let this loss define me or limit my future.
That moment was the beginning of everything that followed.
But here is what I can’t stop thinking about.
I was lucky. I had skills. I had years of hijacker work that gave me the framework to hear that voice and recognize it as something foreign, something that did not belong to me.
Most women don’t have that.
Most women hear those thoughts in their own voice and believe them. They have no framework that says: this is a hijacker speaking, not a truth. They have no tools to push back. They sit with the heaviness and assume it is simply what loss feels like, simply what aging feels like, simply what life looks like from here.
They are not weak. They are not failing.
They are defenseless against something they cannot see.
What the biology explains
Grief activates the Aging Default at the cellular level. Dr. Stephen Porges’ polyvagal research established that profound loss drops the nervous system into a sustained collapse state, the body reading loss as biological threat, suppressing the regenerative chemistry that keeps us vital.
This is why grief ages you. Not metaphor. Measurable biology.
But a cardiologist studying resilience found something that gave me hope. People with a clear sense of purpose carry measurably lower inflammatory markers and significantly better cardiovascular health, regardless of what they have lost.
Purpose, she documented, acts as a biological shield. It is the signal that moves the nervous system out of collapse and back into regenerative states.
Finding the question, what did she come to give me, and how do I carry it forward, is not spiritual bypassing. It is the precise biological shift the body requires to begin youthing again.
I go much deeper into this science in today’s video.
Where the love went
I made a decision. And I want to be honest: it was a decision, not a gift that arrived on its own. A hard, deliberate, daily choice I still have to make.
I stopped looking for my mother in the physical.
I started demanding of myself that I seek her in the spiritual.
The grief didn’t disappear. It doesn’t. Seventy years of love does not resolve. But the love found somewhere to go.
Science calls it purpose and measures it as lower inflammation. I experience it as my mother, still present, arriving now through every woman who finds her flame again.
The love didn’t end when her body did.
That is the miracle. Not that the pain went away.
That love proved itself stronger than loss.
And even in the hard work of choosing that again and again, it still feels like a miracle, because the loss is that profound.
You don’t grieve this deeply for something small. You grieve this deeply because you loved this well.
That is your flame. Not its extinction.
Why I can’t let this go
At the 2009 Vancouver Peace Summit, the Dalai Lama said the world will be saved by the western woman.
He spoke about compassion, about women’s sensitivity to suffering, about the unique combination of resources and freedom that women in the West carry. About what becomes possible when that combination is activated rather than buried.
I think about that every day.
Because I watch women die inside at the hand of hijackers they cannot name. Accomplished, brilliant, loving women who have survived everything life handed them, and who are now sitting in the heaviness of loss or age or exhaustion, hearing a voice that speaks in their own tone, telling them their best days are behind them.
And they believe it.
Because no one told them it wasn’t theirs.
The wasted potential of these women is staggering to me. The world they could still change. The love they still carry. The flame that is not gone, not even close to gone, only buried under a hijacker they were never taught to recognize.
I can’t let them die inside at the hand of these hijackers.
I can’t and I won’t.
The Loss Alchemy Practice
This week’s practice is for anyone carrying love that has nowhere to go. I walk through it in real time in today’s video.
* Mirror Moment. Look at your eyes. Not the lines. The woman who has loved this deeply.
* Heart Activation. Bring to mind a terrible loss. Something you are grieving. Not the absence. The love underneath the ache. Dive into the love. Feel the eternal connection. Let that connection get bigger and brighter.
* Cellular Communication. Let that love, the grief and the warmth both, be the signal you send inward. Your cells respond to this. The research is specific and I cover it in the video.
* Feel Your Flame Expanding. Feel how your love is your flame.
* Anchor Statement. Say it slowly, out loud if you can: “My grief is alive inside my flame, not separate from it.”
Three minutes. In the chair, or wherever you carry your loss.
And if a voice arrives that sounds like yours but says things that are not true, you know what to do now.
Wait a minute. What is this?
That is the beginning.
If this reached something in you, share it with a woman who is carrying loss and doesn’t know yet that her flame is still burning. She needs to know the difference between clean grief and what moves in after.
With love,
Kristin van Tilburg, MSWyourlivingflame.com
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