You Are Not Broken

If you are reading this, your world has tilted. Not in one dramatic instant, but slowly, unbearably, with the knowledge that someone you love is leaving, and there is nothing you can do to stop it.

I know this too. My mom is dying. She has advanced lung cancer that spread to her brain. There is no recovery arc. No redemption twist. She will not get better. And I am still here, young, trying to live. Trying to make her proud. Trying to stay close. Trying to figure out how to live with her, and, at the same time, how to prepare to live without her.

This is the quiet brutality of anticipatory grief. It is not a moment. It’s a long, slow unraveling. It begins while your person is still alive, while they’re sitting across from you, saying your name, asking what you want for dinner. It begins in the middle of moments you want to bottle forever. You feel it even as you pour coffee, or adjust a pillow, or laugh together for what might be the last time. Or the last time in the mids of fall, or the last time when you’re wearing this or that, or it might be the last time she asks you that specific question with that shade of nail-polish on. Life changes her perspective, and you change yours.

You are not broken for feeling like the world has stopped spinning. For feeling like you can’t keep up with your own life while part of your heart lives besides someone you love. You are holding something enormous, invisible, and constant.

The impossible polarity: living while losing

This is the paradox I live in: I want to give everything to her, my time, my presence, my softness. I want to be near, to say yes to every tea moment, to savor whatever is left. But I’m also still building my own life. I have ideas, responsibilities, desires, deadlines. There are parts of me that still want to run, to grow, to build something she can be proud of.

Some days I feel guilty for working. Other days I feel guilty for not working. Some hours I feel present and grounded in her presence. Other hours I panic that I’m not doing enough, not honoring her time, not capturing every tiny moment the right way.

This is the duality no one warns you about. That while you’re living your last months or years with your parent, you are also, simultaneously, painfully, beginning to learn how to live without them. I despise this chapter often. I wish sickness came with a warning sign, so I kinda knew how to enjoy the final moments with her before we entered this stage of life.

You start grieving before they’re gone

This grief does not wait for the final breath. It begins with the diagnosis. With the shifts in their energy. With the moment you realize their voice will one day only exist in memory. You are grieving while they’re still here, which means every goodbye might carry more weight than your body can hold.

This kind of grief is quiet and isolating. It’s hard to name. You feel strange grieving a person who is still alive. But the truth is, your system already knows. It is beginning to reckon with the coming absence.

And it’s exhausting. Sometimes.

The body remembers

Your body absorbs this reality even before your mind can sort it. My own body became hyper-alert. Any sound from her room made me jump. My jaw clenched in sleep. I forgot how to eat like a person. Time stretched and folded in on itself.

If you feel like your body is acting strange, tighter, more tired, forgetful, that’s not dysfunction. That’s your system trying to carry a load no one ever trained us for. Trust me: it’s just a tiny chapter. When she got sick, I closed down my office a few months later to take care of her. The first few weeks I felt strange, tighter, more tired, forgetful. Eventually I made space within my calendar for long walks, daily. 2-3 hours. That helped me initiate the shift. I know I needed to ground within myself and change my perspective.

Small anchors help: warm food you can smell. A walk outside, even if you cry the whole time. A hand on your chest before you look at your phone. Anything that reminds your body that this moment, right now, is safe enough to exhale in.

The heartbreak of the unknown timeline

What’s especially cruel is that you don’t know how long this season will last. Months? A year? Less? More? You don’t know when the last phone call will be. You don’t know which moment will become the final memory. That uncertainty turns time into a raw edge.

You want to make it count, but you’re also human. You get tired. You get distracted. You scroll. You cry when you don’t expect to. You laugh and then feel guilty for laughing. You wish for more time and also wish you could hit pause on your own life.

What helps (without pretending to fix)

Here’s what has helped me, a little:

• Letting go of the pressure to do it perfectly.
• Naming the polarity out loud: “I want to be with her, and I want to keep moving forward. Both are true.”
• Creating small rituals that feel like mine: tea before screens. A breath before entering her room. Music that holds me.
• Writing down what matters, even when I don’t know what to do with the knowing.

I also keep two lists. One is for task, hospital forms, groceries, things that must happen. The other is for soul charges, a walk with someone who gets it, a voice note from a friend who doesn’t need me to perform, a moment alone in the bath.

And when it feels like too much, I ask: What hurt today? What helped? What still matters after today?

You are not broken

You are not weak for swinging between presence and distance. You are not a bad daughter for feeling afraid, or for secretly needing time to yourself. You are not a failure for laughing, or for wanting a life after this. You are allowed to hold both. To grieve and to dream. To show up and to rest. To remember and to forget, and then remember again.

Some days I forget my mom is sick. Not because I’m in denial, but because I find myself inside the pulse of my own life. I’m working, building, creating. I’m helping other people move forward, sometimes through a psychic reading, sometimes through business mentoring, sometimes just by reflecting back someone’s deepest clarity. My work is about growth, truth, and sustainability, and when I’m in it, I feel fully alive. I don’t feel like I’m chasing anything. I feel like I’m finally allowing life to move through me. And still, when I stop moving, it hits me again: my mom is transitioning. She won’t always be here. The breath, the voice, the text message, the daily rituals, one day, they will fall silent. That contrast is dizzying.

Psychologists call this the dual process model of coping with grief: where we oscillate between “loss-oriented” and “restoration-oriented” experiences. It’s completely normal, even healthy, to swing between deep emotional presence with the grief, and moments where we focus on life outside it. That swing isn’t avoidance. It’s the mind’s way of keeping us afloat. But even when I know that intellectually, the guilt creeps in. One minute I feel selfish for thriving while she is declining. The next, I feel proud that I’ve built something meaningful in the middle of a storm. This push-pull can be disorienting. I can go from feeling like a self-absorbed egomaniac to a soft, devoted daughter in the space of one hour.

The truth is, both are real. Both belong. The human psyche isn’t built for linear emotion. We move in spirals. We hold multitudes. There is nothing unnatural about feeling joy in the same week, or hour, as profound anticipatory sorrow. What matters most is that we stay honest. That we keep making space for both the love and the life. Not either-or. Both-and. That’s what this season teaches me every day.

If you’re walking through this season, I hope you know: you are already doing something extraordinary. You are loving someone through the slow goodbye. You are beginning to build a life that will one day exist without them, while they are still here. That is the hardest thing.

You are not broken. You are brave.

And you are not alone.

If you want company for your walk, Moeder, hart, dochters, blik is on Spotify. Let another daughter’s voice echo with your own. It’s a Dutch podcast I started with my mom.

Love,
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