My Why

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My daughter is Aliza. She was born May 2, 1980, and she died on December 22, 1996 — sixteen years old, two days after a car accident on a slushy winter road.

She had a smile that could light up a room. She could not lie — the smile always gave her away. I loved her for it. I love her for it still.

Losing her broke me in ways I didn't name for a long time.

For years I told myself a quiet story — that my grief wasn't the worst kind, that others had it harder, that I didn't need as much room to fall apart as I actually did.

That is what trauma does when it goes unnamed. It teaches you to stand apologetically inside your own pain. To finish last in the ranking of other people's suffering before your grief is allowed to be real.

I know now that what I experienced is trauma. Mine. Real. Valid without comparison.

I also know this from another direction. I have four living children — two of them are addicts. I know what it is to grieve a child who is gone, and I know what it is to grieve children who are still here.

They are not the same grief. But they are both real.

And in both, I have heard that same quiet voice telling me to make myself smaller.

There are mothers watching their children disappear into addiction — slowly, with no clear ending and no clean grief. And the voice that whispers at least they're still here is the same minimizing I know.

Grief does not require a death certificate to be real. Loss does not have to be final to be devastating.

This space is for all of it. For the losses the world witnesses and the ones it doesn't. For anyone who has ever made themselves smaller inside their own pain just to survive it.

You don't have to earn your grief. It is already yours.