When Love Asks Us to Let Go

Last week asked me to stand at two completely different ends of life and learn what it means to let go. My eldest Son started university and moved out of home, beginning a new chapter filled with possibility, independence and everything still waiting for him to discover. Then, on Saturday, my aunt passed away. She chose to leave this life peacefully and on her own terms, bringing her journey to an end in the way she felt was right for her.

These were two very different goodbyes, carrying very different emotions, but they both asked something of my heart. One asked me to release my son further into life and trust the wings I had helped him grow. The other asked me to release my aunt from life while holding gratitude for everything she gave me during the five years I was fortunate enough to know her.

When my Son left home, I felt an enormous mixture of pride, happiness, excitement, nostalgia and sadness. I am immensely proud that he is choosing his own way in life, and I am excited for the people he will meet, the things he will learn and all the experiences that will help shape the man he is becoming. He has so much more available to him than I ever did at his age, and I tried to make sure that he grew up knowing that the world held possibilities for him.

At the same time, the beautiful child I once held in my arms walked out of my door to begin building a life beyond our home. I had to work my way through what that meant for me without placing the weight of my emotions upon him. This was his moment to feel happy and excited. My tears belonged to me, not to him, and I did not want my sadness to make him feel guilty for doing exactly what I raised him to do.

That does not mean I hid from my feelings or pretended that his leaving did not hurt. I allowed myself to cry because I needed to acknowledge that something had changed. My son is not gone, and we still speak almost every day, but the shape of our relationship is changing. Motherhood is asking me to move from knowing where he is and being able to protect him within my home to trusting the man I raised to protect himself.

That has brought fear with it. It is not because I need to know where he is or what he is doing every second of the day. It is the fear of knowing that his safety is no longer within my hands in quite the same way. When he lived at home, I knew where he was coming back to. I could notice when something was wrong, make sure he had eaten and step in when life became difficult. Now his choices and his safety are one hundred per cent in his hands.

I have had to recognise that fear without allowing it to become something he must carry. I cannot tie my worry to his wings and still tell him to fly. I have given him the tools I could, and now I have to trust that he will use them. He also knows that I am here whenever he needs me, because moving out does not mean moving beyond my love, support or guidance.

He carries so much of me into this next part of his life. He has my thirst for life and wants to get out into the world, meet people and keep moving forward in the best way he can. He is soft-hearted and gentle, but he also knows how to ask for what he wants and needs. He is a beautiful soul, and I do not say that simply because he is my son; I say it because that is genuinely who he is.

Like me, he loves feeding people. Cooking tasty meals and making sure that the people I love have what they need has always been one of my favourite ways of caring for them, and he carries that too. He loves baking, he values connection and staying in touch with the people he loves does not feel like a chore to him. It brings him happiness in the same way it brings happiness to me.

He is intuitive too, and lately he has been asking more about my intuitive understanding of situations so that he can compare it with what he is sensing for himself. I love watching him learn to trust that part of who he is. I know he will conquer the world in his own way, and more than anything, I hope he carries his integrity with him because integrity sits at the root of everything we wish to learn, achieve and become.

Skills may help him create opportunities and confidence may help him reach for them, but integrity will shape the person he becomes while doing so. It will guide how he treats people, how he responds when nobody is watching and whether he remains true to himself when it would be easier to follow everybody else. He is one of the best things I have ever created, just as my younger son is, and seeing him step into his own life is one of the proudest and most difficult parts of being his mother.

My aunt’s passing brought a different kind of loss. There was no fear surrounding what she had left me because she gave me everything she could while she was here, but there was overwhelming sadness in having to say goodbye to somebody who brought such an important sense of completeness into my life.

I never knew my biological father while I was growing up. Through DNA testing, the Ancestry website and the determination of a very clever friend, I eventually found my father’s family. Unfortunately, my father had already passed away by then, but I was given the opportunity to know his sister. Finding my aunt felt like finding a missing part of myself.

For much of my life, people would look at me and say, “Cindy, you are not like your family.” There were parts of my personality that I could not fully understand because I had never seen where they came from. My compassion, my ability to pick myself up and continue moving forward, the fire within me and my determination to fight for what I want did not always seem to have a clear reflection in the family I had known growing up.

Through my Aunt, Grandmother and Cousins, I discovered a line of strong women with enormous strength of character. These were women with toughness, conviction and the courage to stand beside what they believed regardless of what anybody else thought. Suddenly, qualities within me that had once felt unexplained had a history. I was no longer a stranger to myself.

My Aunt gave me that gift. She became a living connection to my father’s side of the family and helped me understand why certain parts of me existed. Although she was only physically in my life for five years, she made sure I knew everything she could share with me during that time. I still have my cousins, and the connection she helped create did not disappear when she passed away.

We often measure relationships by how long somebody has been present, but time does not always reflect the meaning of a connection. Sometimes it takes only one person to connect with us in the right way for our whole life to begin making sense, and my aunt was that person for me. She helped return my roots to me, and through knowing her I was able to recognise the inheritance of strength that had been living within me all along.

It feels significant that, within the same week, I was asked to say goodbye to the woman who helped me understand where I came from and to watch my son leave home to discover where he is going. My aunt gave me roots, and I have spent twenty years helping my son grow wings. My heart has felt as though it has been caught in a vice grip between those two changes, and I have shed tears of both sadness and happiness while allowing myself to work through every emotion as it arrived.

These experiences have reminded me that grief does not belong only to death. We can grieve somebody who has passed away, a child leaving home, a relationship ending, a person choosing to walk away or a version of our life that can no longer continue in the form we once knew. These losses are not all the same, and they do not carry the same finality, but they each ask us to acknowledge that something has changed.

We should allow ourselves to feel that loss without letting it consume everything that follows. There is no timeline for grief, and nobody should be forced to release it before they are ready. One person may begin finding moments of peace quite quickly, while another may need much longer before the heaviness begins to loosen. We must give ourselves the compassion to feel what we genuinely feel rather than performing grief in the way other people believe we should.

However, there is a difference between allowing grief to have its season and allowing it to become every season that remains. When grief stays locked inside us, it can affect our mental and physical wellbeing, cause us to shut down, feed anger and encourage us to build walls around our hearts. We may begin believing that if we keep everybody at a distance, we can protect ourselves from ever feeling another loss.

Fear can also creep into grief and convince us that remaining frightened is safer than facing something new. Sometimes it feels easier to remain buried beneath our emotions than to let them flow, because flowing emotions eventually carry us towards change. Moving forward requires us to enter a future that no longer looks exactly as it did before, and the unknown can feel terrifying when our hearts are already tender.

We can even turn that fear into blame and begin asking what we should have done differently, why we feel the way we do or whether we could have prevented the loss. Self-blame gives us the illusion that we once had control, but there are parts of life we cannot change, no matter how much we revisit the past. People grow, leave, walk away and die. These are all parts of life’s cycles, and healing asks us to face them without allowing fear to decide the rest of our story.

Go through the emotions you need to experience. Cry when the tears come, acknowledge the anger, sit with the emptiness and give yourself the space to understand what has changed. Healing does not ask us to avoid these feelings or cover them with forced positivity. It asks us to move through them as honestly and healthily as we can, remembering that feeling our grief is different from surrendering our entire identity to it.

Letting go does not mean forgetting, and it does not mean that the love has disappeared. My son remains my love and light even though his life is expanding beyond my home. My aunt remains within my understanding of myself, the strength I now know I inherited and the family connections she helped me find. Releasing them means allowing each of them to continue their journey in the form it must now take, while allowing myself to continue mine.

We cannot change the past, but we can decide what we carry forward from it. We can carry fear, guilt and the belief that loving always leads to unbearable loss, or we can carry the love, lessons and pieces of ourselves that another person helped us discover. Moving forward is not a betrayal of those we love. It is how we allow their presence in our lives to keep creating something meaningful after the goodbye.

Sometimes love asks us to hold on, nurture, protect and remain beside somebody while they need us. At other times, that same love asks us to loosen our hands. It asks us to trust the child we raised, honour the person whose journey has ended and accept that keeping somebody within our heart does not require us to remain trapped inside the pain of losing the way they once existed beside us.

Feel the loss. Honour what it meant. Give grief the time it needs, but do not allow fear to persuade you that you must stop living in order to prove that you loved. Let them go where their journey is calling them, let yourself feel everything their leaving has awakened, and when your heart is ready, allow the love they gave you to become part of the strength that carries you forward.

Sending you so much Light and Love

Cindy 💗🧚🏻‍♀️💜