When My Son Died, I Met the Adult I’d Never Been

I used to think I became an adult when I got my first job, paid my own rent, or became a mother for the first time when my daughter was born. Those were milestones, yes — but in hindsight, they weren’t what truly shaped me. I didn’t really become an adult until I lost my son, Colton, when he was just 18.

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That moment — the one that shattered my heart and split my life into before and after — was when everything changed. But even then, I didn’t feel like an adult. I felt lost. I looked in the mirror, and I didn’t recognize the woman staring back at me. For more than 40 years, I had known myself — my quirks, my laugh, the way I moved through the world. But after Colton died, I was a stranger to myself. There was no joy in my reflection, no spark in my eyes. Just emptiness. Just survival.

For the first two years, I drifted through grief like a ghost. I didn’t know who I was anymore, only who I had been — the Before. And the version of me that existed in the aftermath felt like a shadow — unfamiliar, hollow, unmoored. And every other adjective that I can think of, because his loss shook to my F’in core and still does to this day. There’s not a moment I don’t feel his loss.

In year three something shifted, not the feelings of loss but something small, not dramatic. There was no lightning bolt, no revelation. Just a…