When My Past Won’t Stay in the Past

There are moments when life stops feeling linear.

When your past, your present, and your future all seem to occupy the same breath.

That’s where I am right now.

Every time I start to feel like I’m finding my footing in the present — every time I begin to imagine a future that feels steady, hopeful, and real — my past seems to come rushing back like a wave. It doesn’t knock gently. It crashes. And in the middle of ordinary, unexpected moments, I’m suddenly pulled into a kind of grief that feels catastrophic in its intensity, as if something inside me is drowning.

I am caring for someone who is deeply loved by my husband — someone I hadn’t known long before this — yet somehow I now find myself standing in one of the most intimate roles a human being can hold. To sit beside someone at the end of their life. To tend. To witness. To help carry them through a sacred threshold.

And layered on top of that… I am doing it in the presence of people who once meant everything to me.

The clinicians who come into this home — the steady hands, the quiet voices, the gentle guidance — are the very people I used to lead, work beside, and hold close to my heart. They are no longer mine. And yet here they are, walking with me through this moment, guiding me now in a way that feels both beautiful and shattering.

I don’t know why this is breaking me the way it is.

But hospice has always lived somewhere deeper than logic in my soul.

There is something profoundly sacred about being allowed into the final chapter of someone’s story. About slowing down enough to honor breath, touch, and presence when the rest of the world keeps racing. About knowing that what you are offering is not something you can quantify — only feel.

Being here, doing this, has filled something in me I didn’t realize was empty.

And at the same time, it is opening old wounds I thought had already healed.

My two worlds — the one that shaped me, and the one I am becoming — are colliding inside this quiet home. The past. The present. The future. All pressed into the same fragile space.

I feel peace.

I feel grief.

I feel purpose.

I feel pain.

All at once.

I don’t yet know what any of it means.

I only know that this moment is asking me to stand in the middle of it — not to solve it, not to make sense of it — but simply to feel it.

And maybe that, too, is part of what it means to care. 💜