Losing my father suddenly changed something inside me that I didn’t notice right away. In the beginning, I was just trying to survive the shock, the rituals, the silence, the strange emptiness that fills a house when a voice goes missing. But as time moved on, I realized the loss had left behind something else – a constant fear that I could lose anyone at any moment. It felt like my heart no longer trusted life the way it used to.
Before he passed, I moved through the world assuming tomorrow would look like today. But when someone you love leaves without warning, your mind learns a painful lesson: things can change in one breath. And suddenly, every person you care about starts to feel fragile. When someone doesn’t answer their phone, your stomach drops. When someone is late, your heart starts preparing for the worst. Even on good days, your mind quietly whispers, “What if something happens?”
This fear didn’t come because I am negative or anxious by nature. It came because my heart was caught off guard once, and it is still trying to protect me. It’s as if a part of me believes that if I stay alert, I won’t be blindsided again. But living like that becomes exhausting. Instead of enjoying the people around me, I began imagining losing them. Instead of feeling love, I felt the weight of possible loss sitting behind it.
For a long time, I thought something was wrong with me. But then I realized this fear is a natural response to sudden loss. My mind wasn’t predicting the future – it was reacting to the past. It was replaying the shock of losing my father, not telling me that something else was about to happen. Understanding that made the fear a little less powerful.
Escaping that feeling is not a switch you turn off. It’s a slow, gentle process. It starts with telling yourself the truth: I am scared because I loved someone deeply, and losing him hurt in a way I still don’t fully understand. Naming the feeling takes away some of its force. It makes it something you can look at, not something that controls you.
I also had to learn to bring myself back to the present. When my mind jumped ahead, imagining terrible outcomes, I would try to remind myself: This moment is safe. This person is okay. Today is not the day I lost my father. Some days my heart believes it, some days it doesn’t – but saying it helps.
And slowly, I started rebuilding trust in life. Not blind trust, not careless trust, but a softer belief that not every story ends the way his did. People don’t disappear.Love doesn’t have to feel like fear. It took time, but eventually the grip of that fear loosened. It still lives inside me in small ways, but it no longer takes over every thought.
Maybe this is what healing actually looks like – not forgetting the loss, not pretending everything is fine, but learning to live again without expecting the world to break every time you begin to love someone. Grief changes you, but it doesn’t have to imprison you. And little by little, you learn that life can still hold safety, softness, and hope, even after it has taken something you loved so much