Who Do You See When You Close Your Eyes?

Aug 11, 2026

Someone asked me recently: "Who do you see when you close your eyes?"

I didn't hesitate.

I see who I have become.

Strength. Passion. Forgiveness. Truth. Peace. Becoming.

That answer didn't come easily. It took years of walking through loss, of sitting with grief that had no one to sit with me, of reaching for God in the dark and finding Him there. It took hiking trails and long drives and conversations held in empty rooms. It took burying people I loved — too many people — and surviving the silence that followed.

But today? When I close my eyes, I don't see the girl who was shattered by grief.

I see who that grief made me.

Grief strips your identity bare.

This is the part no one tells you before it happens. You don't just lose the person — you lose the self that existed in relationship to them. You lose the daughter. The best friend. The woman who called her dad on Sunday afternoons just to hear his voice.

And you don't get to stay who you were. The loss changes you whether you want it to or not.

I lost my dad in 2003. My father-in-law in 2005. My mother in 2013. My mother-in-law in 2022. My friends Starr, Nicole, Linda, and Trudi — each one a different kind of grief, each one taking a piece of me I hadn't planned to part with.

After each loss, I had a choice: stay buried in who I used to be, or slowly — painfully — begin to discover who I was becoming.

Identity doesn't disappear in grief. It transforms.

Here's what I've come to understand: loss doesn't destroy your identity. It burns away the parts that were never fully you to begin with — the roles you played, the relationships that defined you, the version of yourself that only existed in someone else's reflection.

What remains is something more essential. More true.

After I lost my dad, I discovered a relationship with God I hadn't known before. Walking alone through grief, I found out I was stronger than I believed. When no one came to sit with me, I learned to sit with myself.