Grieving the Person You Used to Be

I did not lose her all at once.

That is the first thing you need to understand about this particular kind of grief.

It did not arrive in a single dramatic moment. It arrived in stages. Over years. Each stage asking her to set down a little more of herself for someone else's survival.

Stage one was the civic life.

I was young and active and fully engaged in the world around me. I organized events for the community. I led clubs. I put on shows. I was involved in the NAACP — contributed to their education fund so significantly that I was honored for it.

I was president of an international organization.

At my first meeting as president, I did what I believed leadership required — I brought in the people the room was not expecting. Influential Black leaders. The kind of people who belonged in that room and had been kept out of it.

They voted me out.

Not because I failed at leadership. Because I succeeded at it in a way that made certain people deeply uncomfortable.

That woman — the one bold enough to fill a room with the people the room was not expecting — she was real. She was fierce. She was doing exactly what she was supposed to do. And they voted her out anyway. That was the first stage of learning that the world does not always have room for the fullest version of who you are.

Stage two was his stroke.

February 2019. My husband collapsed. And the woman who had been slowly stepping back from public life became, overnight, a full-time caregiver.

Sixty-nine days in a hospital chair.

I did not go home. I did not rest. I was there — constantly, completely, entirely there — because he needed me in a way that left no room for anything or anyone else.

I was four hundred pounds at the time. The hospital required nearly a mile of navigation from the parking lot to his room in the ICU. I made that walk every day. My back broke under the weight of it. I had to start walking with a cane.

He did not know my name. He did not know who Jesus was. He did not know the Bible or basic scripture. He did not know what month it was.

I taught him his ABCs. I taught him to walk again. I taught him to talk again. I sat beside him and worked with the patience of someone who had nowhere else to be and everything at stake.

The woman who had organized civic events and led international organizations — she became the woman in the hospital chair. And somewhere in those sixty-nine days, the traveling stopped. The preaching stopped. The going and doing and building and filling rooms stopped.

Stage three was the diagnosis.

End-stage renal disease. Dialysis three times a week. Multiple surgeries. Multiple hospitalizations. Multiple near-death experiences in a single year.

A body that changed. A walk that changed. A lean forward that was not there before. A level of energy that is not what it was. A schedule built around a machine that keeps me alive but also keeps me tethered in ways I was never tethered before.

The cruise I cannot just jump on. The beach I cannot reach without help. The pulpit I cannot stand behind for an hour anymore.

She is still in here. Active, invigorated, upbeat, excited about life — still here.

But living in a life that has been rearranged around everyone else's survival for so long that she has not had much room to simply be herself.

There are specific reasons why this grief gets suppressed — especially in people of faith.

We are still alive.

The reasoning goes: I should not grieve a version of myself when people are grieving actual deaths. I have my health — or what is left of it. I am still here. Who am I to grieve?

This reasoning sounds humble. It is actually a form of self-abandonment.

We have been told to focus on what we still have.

Gratitude is powerful. Gratitude is necessary. Gratitude is not the enemy of grief.

But gratitude deployed prematurely — before the grief has been acknowledged — becomes a silencer.

It says: you should not feel this because look at what you have.

True gratitude does not erase grief. It coexists with it.

You can be genuinely grateful that you are still here AND genuinely grieve the version of yourself whose life looked different. Both are true. Both deserve space.

We confuse grieving with complaining.

Grieving the person you used to be is not ingratitude. It is not self-pity. It is not weakness.

Isaiah 43:18-19 is one of the most personally significant passages in all of Scripture for this conversation.

I want to be careful with this passage because it is often used to rush people past their grief.

God is not saying: get over it. God is not saying: what you lost does not matter. God is not saying: stop looking back.

He is saying: I am not finished.

The former things are real. The past is real. What was lost is real. And — I am doing a new thing. Not instead of what you were. Built on the foundation of what you were.

The woman who stood behind a pulpit for an hour found a different pulpit — a screen, a keyboard, a PDF, a Tuesday night Zoom call where people in hard seasons show up from everywhere because somebody showed up for them.

The woman who used to just go to the beach is teaching people who are tethered — to chairs, to machines, to caregiving schedules, to the limitations of sick bodies — that there is still water available to the spirit even when the ocean is out of reach.