The Life We Build After Loss

Sometimes the most life-changing consequence of a transition isn’t what it takes from us. It’s what we build afterwards to make sure nothing can ever take that much from us again.

I think I realised something about myself this morning that might change the way I understand the last eleven years of my life.

It came from a Substack comment about voice notes.

I’d written a silly little Note about how much I hate receiving long voice notes. Five minutes of someone talking at me while I stare at the little waveform wondering when they’re going to get to the point.

It wasn’t deep. It wasn’t supposed to lead anywhere. It was just one of those ordinary observations about life that you throw out into the world because surely other people are thinking it too.

Then a woman replied.

She said there was nothing better than waking up to a five-and-a-half-minute voice note from her daughter in Australia, chattering away while she walked along the beach watching the whales.

And I automatically replied

That’s a five-minute voice note I’d love to receive. And I’d give anything to receive one like that from my mum. My mum died eleven years ago…”

And as I was writing my reply, I found myself saying something I don’t think I’d ever consciously thought before.

There is nobody in my life I want to receive a five-minute voice note from.

I wrote it. Looked at it. And knew it was true.

And then came the much bigger thought.

I’ve engineered it this way.

Maybe deliberately in places, subconsciously in others. Maybe some combination of personality and preference and experience and the strange adaptations we make after life shows us something we never wanted to know.

But I suddenly saw it.

I’ve built a life with very few people in it who have the power to utterly devastate me by disappearing.

And I think it started when my mum died.

I don’t mean I’ve built a lonely life. That’s the strange thing about this realisation.

I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I love my life. I love living in Spain. I love my husband. I have a couple of friends I care about deeply. I have my cats, who occupy such an enormous piece of my heart that frankly I wish they could send me five-minute voice notes (although knowing them they’d probably just be recordings of them shouting from another room because they can see the bottom of the food bowl).

I have people I know. People I like. Casual friendships. Online friendships. Connections through my writing that are meaningful to me. Conversations that stay with me. People scattered around the world whose names appearing on my screen make me smile.

I’m not isolated.

I’m also not frightened of being alone.

I love my own company. I don’t need a huge social life. I’ve never particularly wanted one. I’m not sitting here wishing my phone would ring more often. I don’t have some secret longing for a gang of twelve best friends and a constantly buzzing WhatsApp group. Even the thought exhuasts me.

I’m not afraid of dying alone either, strangely enough. I know that’s something we’re supposed to fear, but I don’t think I do.

So this realisation hasn’t arrived carrying an instruction.

It hasn’t made me think, Oh God, I need more close friends.

I don’t.

It has simply turned a light on in a room I didn’t consciously know was there.

And now I’m standing in the doorway looking around.

Because I think somewhere in the aftermath of losing my mum I learned something about love that I hadn’t understood before.

You can survive losing someone you love. But surviving it doesn’t mean you ever want to have to survive that much loss again.

There are people whose deaths make you unbearably sad.

And then there are people whose deaths alter the structure of your world.

My mum was the second kind.

Losing her wasn’t simply losing someone I loved. It was discovering that a person who had always existed could suddenly not exist. That someone could be woven so completely through your understanding of yourself, your history, your memories, your sense of home, that when they disappeared the world could continue looking exactly the same while feeling completely different.

The sun still came up.

People still went to work.

The bins still needed putting out.

Somebody somewhere was complaining about the weather.

And my mum was dead.

I remember thinking that was one of the strangest things about grief. The sheer ordinariness surrounding something that felt completely and devestatingly impossible.

And you survive it because there isn’t really another option.

Days keep arriving.

You keep getting out of bed.

Eventually you laugh without immediately remembering that you’re grieving. Then one day you realise you’ve gone an hour without thinking about it. Then an afternoon. Then there are whole stretches of life between the moments when it comes back and knocks the air out of you.

Eleven years later, I have a happy life.

A genuinely happy one.

But what I hadn’t considered until this morning was what else I might have been doing during those eleven years.

Because maybe grief doesn’t only leave an absence.

Maybe it teaches us things.

And maybe some of those lessons become so deeply embedded that eventually we mistake them for personality.

I think I learned that loving someone that much is dangerous.

Not consciously. I don’t remember deciding it.

I certainly never sat down and thought, Right, that’s enough of that. From now on nobody gets close enough to destroy me.

But looking at the architecture of my life now, I wonder whether some part of me did exactly that.

Not by closing myself off completely. That would have been much easier to spot.

I did something far more sophisticated.

I built an emotional island.

And I’ve made it lovely here.

That’s the bit I keep coming back to.

This isn’t a bleak island with one palm tree and a woman desperately waving at passing ships.

I’ve furnished the place.

There are books everywhere. There are cats. There’s sunshine. There’s curiosity and writing and swimming and wandering around Spain. There’s my husband. There’s work I care deeply about and people I enjoy and a whole world I’m interested in.

People visit the island all the time.

Some stay longer than others.

I talk to them. I care about them. I listen to their stories. I share mine. I connect deeply with people in conversations. I can be open and vulnerable. I can love them.

But very few people get permanent residency.

And around the island, apparently, I’ve put shark-infested waters.

I had no idea.

Or maybe I did.

Maybe we always know these things somewhere underneath.

What I know is that there are very few load-bearing people in my life.

That’s the phrase that keeps coming to me.

The people whose existence becomes so woven into the structure of your own life that if you remove them, something collapses.

My mum was load-bearing.

My husband is.

My cats, in their own entirely different and slightly ridiculous way, are too.

And there aren’t many others.

Maybe that’s what that woman’s comment revealed to me.

She wasn’t really telling me about a voice note from her daughter.

She was telling me about having someone whose ordinary life matters enormously to you.

Five and a half minutes of chatter.

Walking on a beach. Watching whales. Nothing important. Everything important.

And my response wasn’t really about voice notes either.

It was grief.

I’d give anything for that.

There is something almost unbearably tender about the ordinary things we miss when somebody dies. Not the grand declarations. Not the birthdays or Christmases or enormous life events we know they’ll be absent from.

Their voice.

Their name appearing on your phone.

Something they saw in a shop and thought you’d like.

A completely unnecessary update about somebody you barely remember.

The freedom to be mildly irritated by them because you still believe they’ll be there tomorrow.

I think that’s what caught me.

And then the thought underneath it:

What did losing my mum teach me about loving people?

I don’t know that I’ve ever consciously asked myself that before.

I’ve thought endlessly about what losing her did to me. I’ve thought about grief. I’ve thought about missing her. I’ve thought about becoming a motherless daughter at forty. I’ve thought about all the things she hasn’t seen and all the versions of me she never got to meet.

But I don’t think I’ve ever asked what I built afterwards.

What rules did I write?

What protections did I install?

What decisions did I make without knowing I was making them?

Maybe one of them was very simple.

I can survive losing someone I love. But I never want to have to survive that much loss again.

And so perhaps I created a life in which fewer people could cause it.

There’s an uncomfortable brilliance to that as a survival strategy.

Because it works.

If you don’t make many people essential, very few people can leave an essential-shaped hole.

If you don’t depend too heavily on people, their absence can’t destabilise you.

If you learn to enjoy your own company, you can’t be abandoned in quite the same way.

If your emotional world is spread across lots of lighter connections rather than a handful of enormous ones, nobody carries quite so much structural weight.

Connection without dependency.

Belonging without too many people becoming indispensable.

And I want to be careful here because I have absolutely no desire to pathologise my own happiness.

I don’t want to look at a life I genuinely love and start pulling it apart because apparently every preference needs to be a trauma response now.

Some of this is simply me.

I am introverted. I like space. I like solitude. I have always had a rich internal world. I don’t need constant company to feel connected to life. I don’t believe having twenty close friends is somehow psychologically superior to having two.

But I also don’t think I can unsee what I saw this morning.

There has been a bargain here.

If I don’t let too many people become essential to me, fewer people can devastate me.

And like so many of the bargains we make with ourselves, I think it has given me exactly what I asked for.

Independence.

Self-sufficiency.

Freedom.

Peace.

A capacity to be alone without experiencing myself as abandoned.

A life that doesn’t require a huge cast of people to make it feel full.

Those things are real. I treasure them. I don’t want to give them back.

But I think I’m seeing the price of them for the first time.

Because keeping someone far enough away that losing them couldn’t destroy you may also mean keeping them far enough away that their five-minute voice note could never mean everything.

That’s the bit that caught in my throat.

Not because I suddenly want to change it.

Just because I can see it.

And I’m starting to wonder how many of us have done versions of this without knowing.

Because the enormous transitions in our lives don’t only change us while they’re happening.

They change what happens next.

We talk a lot about surviving the event itself.

The death. The divorce. The betrayal. The burnout. The illness. The redundancy. The infertility. The friendship ending. The relationship collapsing. The thing we didn’t think would happen to us until it did.

There is a before.

There is an after.

But I think there’s also something else.

There is the life we build in response.

We survive the thing and then, without necessarily noticing, start reorganising ourselves around making sure it can never happen again.

We become fiercely independent because dependence once hurt.

We stop asking because being refused once hurt.

We leave first because being left once hurt.

We keep friendships pleasant but not essential.

We become the person who doesn’t need anything.

We make ourselves useful instead of needy.

We tell ourselves we’re just “like this”.

And maybe we are.

But maybe some of what we think of as personality is architecture.

Rooms added after the fire.

Doors moved.

Locks fitted.

Emergency exits installed.

A whole beautiful extension built around something that happened so long ago we’ve forgotten why the original plans changed.

We build beautiful lives on top of decisions we don’t remember making.

And then something completely ordinary happens.

Someone mentions a voice note from her daughter.

Five and a half minutes.

She’s walking on a beach in Australia watching whales.

And suddenly a light catches the architecture from a different angle.

Oh…

That’s why this room is here.

That’s why that door stays locked.

That’s why I built the house this way.

I think this might be one of the strangest things about getting older.

You start discovering the origins of yourself.

Not in some dramatic quest to heal everything that has ever happened to you, but in these tiny moments when something you thought was simply a preference reveals a much older story underneath it.

And I don’t think every discovery requires demolition.

That’s important to me.

I don’t need to tear down the house because I’ve discovered why I built it this way.

I don’t need to drain the shark-infested waters and construct a bridge and start handing out residency permits.

Awareness is enough.

Maybe there is something deeply peaceful about finally understanding the things we’ve done to keep ourselves safe and not immediately demanding that we stop doing them.

I can look at the woman I became after my mum died with enormous tenderness.

Of course she did this.

She discovered that love could hurt on a scale she had never imagined.

She discovered that there are losses you survive but don’t emerge from unchanged.

And apparently, somewhere along the way, she decided to reduce the number of people who would ever be capable of doing that much damage again.

I understand her.

I don’t think she did anything wrong.

I think she built something beautiful.

I live inside it now.

And I love it here.

Maybe that’s what feels so important about this realisation. There is no villain in it. No pathology to diagnose. No lesson about opening my heart or making more friends or becoming a different kind of person.

Just the extraordinary realisation that a transition that happened eleven years ago didn’t end eleven years ago.

It kept travelling.

Into my friendships.

Into my independence.

Into the amount of solitude I need.

Into who I let close.

Into how much I need other people.

Into the shape of the life I eventually built thousands of miles away.

The event ended. Its consequences kept becoming me.

And I suspect that’s true of so many of the things we live through.

We don’t just carry our experiences as memories. We build with them.

They become walls and windows and doors. Boundaries. Preferences. Instincts. Things we seek. Things we avoid. Things we call freedom. Things we call personality. Things we haven’t questioned for years because they work perfectly well.

Until something catches the light.

I still hate long voice notes. That hasn’t changed.

But this morning, somebody told me about one I would give almost anything to receive.

And for a few minutes I could see the whole island.

The life on it.

The water around it.

The sharks I put there.

And me, standing on the shore, realising for the first time that some of the things I’ve always thought were simply who I am might also be the shape love left behind.