The Space You Left Behind continued

Learning to Love Again After Loss

Emma is eight now, and she looks more like you every day. She has your stubborn streak, your terrible jokes, your way of tilting her head when she's thinking hard about something. Sometimes it takes my breath away. Sometimes it's the most beautiful thing in the world.

I've been dating Mark for six months. He's nothing like you—quieter, more careful, the kind of man who asks permission before changing the radio station. He knows he's not replacing you, and he doesn't try to. He just fits into the space I've made for new love, different love, love that doesn't diminish what we had but grows beside it.

You would like him, I think. You would appreciate how he makes Emma laugh, how he never tries too hard, how he fixed the garage door you always meant to get to but never did.

I still miss you. I probably always will.

... But the missing has shape now, boundaries. It doesn't consume everything anymore.

It lives alongside joy and hope and the ordinary magic of Emma's soccer games and Sunday morning pancakes and all the small, precious moments that make up a life.

Sometimes, when the light hits our kitchen just right at 6:47 PM, I swear I can still hear your keys in the door. And I smile instead of cry, because love doesn't end when someone dies. It just learns new ways to exist.

Emma and I are learning too. We're learning that healing doesn't mean forgetting. That moving forward doesn't mean leaving you behind. That the space you left behind isn't empty—it's full of every moment we shared, every laugh, every ordinary Tuesday that felt like nothing special until it became a memory we'd give anything to live again.

We carry you with us now, in Emma's terrible jokes and my off-key humming and the way we both still leave the porch light on, just in case. Just because.

Just because love lives on, even when people can't.

And that has to be enough.

And somehow, miraculously, it is.

written by Sandra Hamilton

in honour of all of us who have lost someone we love

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Dear ,

This summer has been particularly heavy. I have lost so many friends.

The reflective part of me says, “They are not lost, never truly gone. They’ll be forever in my heart.”

But the ordinary, human part of me misses them deeply and feels the pain.

Life Is Just For Living is an e-course I first created in 2021, after my father’s death and during the height of COVID-19.

These past few weeks, I’ve found myself revisiting it — and I want to offer you the opportunity to access it too, in the hope that it might help lighten your load.

It’s on sale now for $89 — a heartfelt discount from its original price of nearly $300 — in honour of my father, who would have been 89 this year.

Read more about it here.

Dr. Sandra Hamilton

Cultivating quiet confidence and power