our story

My mom passed away in 2019.

My dad had passed away almost 15 years earlier, and with my mom's loss I felt like I'd been orphaned. I was grateful she wasn't suffering, and devastated by the loss. I was surprised — maybe more than I should have been — by how hard the grief hit me, and how lonely I felt in the first days and weeks after losing her.

I didn't want to burden the people around me with my sadness. But feeling joy felt like a betrayal of her memory. I turned inward, trying to carry it quietly, the way we've been taught to in this culture.

What I didn't yet understand was that grief doesn't work that way. it doesn't shrink because we ask it to. it just goes underground.

We know death is a given, and yet we rarely stop to acknowledge the fact that grief is, too. Every one of us will lose someone — a parent, a partner, a friend, a version of ourselves we can no longer return to. And yet in western culture we have almost no rituals for what comes after. No structure for the long, dark season that often follows. No script for how to keep showing up when the world the has moved on, but we haven't.

 

After my mother passed away, my sister and I traveled to India to perform her last rites. We'd performed the same rituals with her for my father almost fifteen years earlier, but for the most part, we'd grown up with these rituals at a distance.

Grief draws an invisible line between who you once were and who you are now. It shows you what matters. It asks you, if you let it, how you want to live on the other side of it.

Being surrounded by family in those early days, knowing my sister and I didn't have to hold all that pain alone, gave me something I didn't know I needed — a place to set down grief that overwhelmed me. It was a reminder that humans have always built ceremony around loss — honored it as a part of life. A way to say: this person mattered. This moment matters. We are changed by this.

That experience led me to a question that has guided everything I've done since: how do we honor what it means to be human in a particular season, without rushing past it?

 

The pandemic arrived on the heels of my mother's passing and answered part of that question. Suddenly the world was inundated in grief — the loss of life, yes, but also the loss of life as we once knew it. We learned, collectively and painfully, that people may be replaceable in the workplace, but they're not replaceable in our lives.

When all is said and done, our relationships are what remain. Our rituals are what remain. 

When I arrived home I found that in addition to navigating the labyrinth of legal and practical details that come with loss, the world had continued turning as if nothing had happened, and I was expected to turn with it. 

At work, sitting in meetings felt surreal. Pointless. While some people acknowledged my loss by leaving sympathy cards in my office, many others didn't know what to say — so they said nothing at all. I didn't blame them. Most of us don't lack the desire to show up for each other. We lack the language. We lack the structure. We lack the understanding that sometimes, returning, again and again, is enough. 

And then one day, the envelopes started arriving.

 

Month after month, a small group of friends sent cards and notes of love and encouragement. Quiet, consistent proof that someone still remembered. That I hadn't been forgotten. That the loss the world had moved on from was still being witnessed and held by people who loved me. Those cards and notes — and the empathy and sustained presence behind them — became a lifeline, and eventually, a calling.

I was lucky. I grew up in a family where love was never in question — imperfect, like all families, but never absent. And in the last months of my mother's life, we had time for meaningful conversations.Nothing was left unsaid. She knew she was loved. We knew we were loved by her.

 

Not everyone gets that. And even when we do, grief still arrives and stays longer than the world expects it to. Longer than most people around us know how to hold.

That's why I created love in action.

Not to fix grief or rush anyone through it, but to give the people who aren't sure how to support someone in their season of grief a way to keep showing up — through the long, quiet months after the world has moved on. To restore the language of connection we lost in the rush toward efficiency and individualism. To create rituals of care that say, I'm still here. I still remember. You're not alone.

Because we were never meant to navigate life's most profound moments alone.

 

Grief has never left me. But it has changed shape.

It no longer sits in the center of everything. It's grown around me — woven into who I am, part of the texture of my life rather than the whole of it. I have returned to joy. To laughter. To deep, sustaining connection. To the particular pleasure of being fully present in a good moment without guilt.

For anyone navigating their own season of grief right now — wherever it comes from, whatever it looks like — I share this not as a promise that it gets easier, but as evidence that it gets different. That we can carry it and still be carried. That the invisible line grief draws between who we were and who we are now is not only loss. It's also the beginning of something we may not yet have words for. We don't have to rush toward it. But it is there.

And for anyone who is struggling to support someone through a season of grief and loss, may this be a reminder that there is no script for this. No right words. All we can do is keep showing up after the rest of the world has moved on. My hope is that love in action empathy cards will help us make connection and care not something we get to when we have time, but something we return to, intentionally, across every season.