For you. Some Names Just Transcend

There are moments in life that divide everything into before and after. For my chosen family, that moment came on 22 January 2026.

In a single day, we lost people who were deeply loved. A mother, a cousin and her unborn child, and a lifelong family friend. Another survived after being targeted, but survival does not mean escaping trauma. No one should ever be considered "lucky" simply because they lived through something so horrific. Every person touched by that day has had to learn to exist in a world that suddenly feels unfamiliar.

People often ask how you move on from grief.

The truth is, perhaps we were never meant to move on from it.

Grief is not something to outrun or overcome. It is love with nowhere left to go. It is every memory searching for someone who should still be here. Waiting for them to walk into the room and it all be a horrible nightmare. It is the ache that remains because the love never left.

Many of us believe healing means becoming less sad. We try to silence and dry the tears before anyone notices, to laugh without guilt when happiness finds us. to distract ourselves, and convince ourselves that enough time has passed and we must now be happy. But grief has a way of reminding us that love does not follow a timeline and isn’t going anywhere.

The sadness we carry is not a sign of weakness. It is evidence that we love deeply, and that we were loved just as deeply in return. If our hearts did not hurt, it would mean those lives never mattered. 

The pain exists because they mattered beyond words.

So perhaps healing is not about learning to live without grief. Perhaps it is learning to make room for it.

There will always be an empty chair. Birthdays that feel incomplete. Phone calls that will never come. Milestones they should have witnessed. 

Those moments will always hurt, because love leaves fingerprints on every part of our lives.

And then there is anger

Anger can leech onto your heart and harden it, it can redefine a whole personality because that person no longer knows the difference between friend and foe 

But if we allow that anger to become the whole story, we risk letting violence define the people we lost.

They were never just victims.

They were parents, children, family, friends. They made ordinary moments extraordinary simply by being there. Their lives cannot be measured by the way they died, but by the countless lives they touched while they were here.

Domestic and family violence leaves wounds that reach far beyond those taken from us. It fractures families, communities and generations. Long after the headlines disappear, the people left behind continue carrying the weight of what happened.

That is why we continue speaking.

Why we continue advocating. Why we continue demanding stronger protections and listening to warning signs before they become tragedies. We cannot change what happened to my family and friends, but we can fight for a future where another family never has to carry this same grief.

As we continue forward, we do not leave our grief behind.

We carry it with us because it is woven together with love. 

If you are grieving, don't be afraid of your sadness.

Sit with it..

One day you will notice that the grief still walks beside you, but so does gratitude. Gratitude that you were lucky enough to love someone so completely that losing them could leave such a mark.

Because grief is not the opposite of love.

It is love that refuses to end.