This time of year asks something different of me.

While the world fills with cards and flowers, my body remembers another story—one that has shaped how I understand love itself. For over two decades, Valentine’s Day has never been neutral for me.

On Valentine’s Day in 2004, I went into labor with my daughter, Kara Aubrianna. She was my second child, but the first I conceived naturally—without fertility drugs, without the close medical monitoring that had defined earlier attempts. My pregnancy with her felt easy. Spacious. Trusting.

Every day, I loved the quiet intimacy of our growing relationship—her movements, her kicks, the subtle conversation between my body and hers. I trusted my body.

I labored at home through the night, full of anticipation. When things weren’t progressing and my water had been broken for many hours, we went to the hospital the next day—excited, ready to finally meet her.

Instead, we learned that Kara had died in my womb.

During delivery, it was discovered that her umbilical cord had wrapped tightly around her neck. She had likely passed days earlier.

Immense joy turned into enormous grief in a matter of moments.

Before meaning rushed in—before explanations, before stories—I felt frozen. Overwhelmed. Numb. My brain could not comprehend what had happened. Being full-term, I had mistakenly believed we were safe from loss.

The world kept moving.
I did not.

I was still, suspended in shock.

That moment changed me.
It changed the shape of love in my life.

Grief Is Not a Failure of Love

For many years after Kara’s death, I didn’t think of myself as someone who was grieving. I kept going. Busyness became one of the ways I survived. It helped me stay upright when grief felt too large to face.

When Kara’s birth and death date came each year, I distracted myself. I numbed out. I believed—like so many of us are taught—that grief was something to be endured and then put behind us.

It took more than a decade before I began to understand just how deeply grief had shaped my life.

What I’ve learned since is this: grief does not arrive because something went wrong. Grief arrives because something mattered.

Grief is not the opposite of love.
It is the cost of having loved deeply.

Our culture often treats grief like a malfunction—something to be solved, resolved, or completed. We’re taught about stages, as if grief moves neatly from one emotional box to another and then exits our lives.

But grief doesn’t work that way. It isn’t linear. And it isn’t a problem to fix.

Grief is love continuing after loss.

Grief educator Alan Wolfelt speaks not about stages of grief, but about the needs of the mourner—recognizing that grief asks something of us over time. Not closure. Not completion. But presence.

The Body Holds What the Mind Could Not

For a long time, my grief lived in my body without language.

My body spoke long before my mind was willing to listen.

I carried grief in my heart, building a quiet wall meant to protect me from pain—but one that also kept out joy, intimacy, and connection. I carried it in my hips, too. When I avoid my feelings, my hips ache. Pain became the language my grief used when words were unavailable.

It wasn’t until much later—after another major trauma in 2016 and extensive therapy—that I began to turn toward the grief I had kept so off-limits. Therapists gently guided me toward a part of life I had spent years avoiding.

Less than two years later, I began my yoga teacher training.

That journey invited me into a relationship with my physical body I had never known before.

Through yoga and therapy, I slowly built the capacity to sit with overwhelming feelings without being consumed by them. For a long time, I truly believed that if I let myself feel my grief fully, it would kill me. It felt that big.

But very gradually—breath by breath—I began to recognize my growing ability to stay present with what was hard.

The body knows when we are ready.

What has your body been holding, waiting for the right moment to be felt?

Love Changes Shape, But It Does Not Disappear

Loving Kara taught me the truest meaning of love.

Sometimes we love for no reason other than to love. When we try to control life, we often attempt to contain love with conditions, timelines, and agreements. But love was never meant to be contained.

Love is meant to be felt and released.
It is the ultimate practice of non-attachment.

I love Kara unconditionally. That love did not end with her death. It changed shape.

Her brief existence shaped the woman I became. It softened me. It widened my capacity for tenderness. It taught me the sacredness of ordinary moments—the ones we so easily overlook.

After losing her, I wished I had savored every second of my pregnancy more deeply. That regret became a teacher, inviting me to live with greater presence now.

The only moment promised to us is the one we are breathing right now.

Staying With Grief

I no longer see grief as something I will get over.

Grief is part of my story. I carry it now in a way that no longer leads me toward destruction or disconnection. When it rises—as it still does—I recognize its need to be seen.

So I stay.

I make space for grief in my life. And when I do, it often begins to soften.

But grief is not something I will ever fix. I lost my first daughter. That is a wound I will always carry.

And it has taught me patience—with myself, with healing, and with the slow, non-linear unfolding of life. It has taught me compassion for the unique timing each human needs when navigating grief and trauma.

Grief does not ask us to move on.
It asks us to stay present.

A Gentle Invitation

Perhaps this week, instead of asking yourself how to heal faster or move forward more efficiently, you might sit with a quieter question:

What love are you still carrying—because it shaped you?

There is no rush to answer.
Love reveals itself in its own time.