March 9, 2026

Small Rituals That Carried Me Through Grief

Woman decorating delicious cake with fresh berries at table. Homemade pastry

When people talk about healing after loss, they often make it sound like a project. Something you work on with a plan and a timeline, something that has a beginning and an end. But that has not been my experience. For me, healing has not been one big thing. It has been a collection of very small things, repeated over time, that slowly taught me how to live alongside my grief instead of being buried under it.

These are not practices I found in a book. They are the things I actually return to when I need comfort or grounding. Some of them might sound simple, and they are. But simple does not mean small. Sometimes the simplest rituals are the ones that hold you together.

Finding Leland in the Everyday

After we lost Leland, Danny and I started seeing 11:11 everywhere. On clocks, on receipts, in the most random and unexpected places. It happened so often that it stopped feeling like a coincidence and started feeling like something more. Now, whenever we see 11:11, we use it as a moment to talk to him. It is a pause in the middle of an ordinary day where we stop and say hello to our son. Sometimes it is just a quiet thought. Sometimes we say it out loud. Either way, it is ours.

Shooting stars are another one. On Leland’s due date, there was a meteor shower, and we sat outside and watched it together. Since then, every shooting star feels like him saying hello. I know that might sound like something I am choosing to believe rather than something I can prove, and that is exactly what it is. But grief needs places to land, and these small moments of connection give it somewhere soft to go.

These rituals are personal and they will be different for everyone. What matters is not the specific thing you do, but that you hold space and time for your grief. That you give yourself permission to keep talking to your baby, to keep looking for them in the world around you, to keep the door open between your life and theirs. When you do that, something shifts. The grief does not disappear, but it evolves. It becomes something you can carry instead of something that pins you to the ground.

The Rituals We Have Built as a Family

On Leland’s birthday every year, we bake and decorate a cake as a family. Me, Danny, and Lochlan. It is not a sad day, although there is sadness in it. It is a day where we celebrate the boy who made us parents for the first time, and we make sure Lochlan grows up knowing his brother.

On Leland’s due date, the year we lost him, we planted a peach tree at our lake house. It is still growing. I love that about it. It is alive and changing and reaching toward the sun, and there is something deeply comforting about watching something you planted in grief become something beautiful over time.

These are the kinds of rituals that have meant the most to me. Not grand gestures or elaborate memorials, but real, living things woven into our family life. A cake baked with love. A tree growing by the water. A moment at 11:11 where we all pause and remember.

Asking for Help When I Couldn’t See a Way Forward

I was resistant to therapy for a long time. I had tried it before and it had not been a good experience, so I carried that with me and told myself I could handle things on my own. But after losing Leland, I reached a place so low that I was terrified of where I was headed. I remember just repeating the words over and over: I need help. I need help. I need help.

We found a therapist who specialized in pregnancy and infant loss, and she changed everything for me. She helped me begin to untangle the blame I had been carrying, the belief that what happened was somehow my fault, that I could have done something differently, that my body was the problem. She did not take the grief away, but she helped me reframe the story I was telling myself about it. And that made it possible to keep going.

If you are resistant to therapy, I understand. I was too. But if you are in a place where the weight of your grief feels like it is pulling you under, please consider finding someone who specializes in this kind of loss. It does not have to be forever. It does not have to be perfect. It just has to be someone who understands what you are carrying and can help you find a way to carry it without breaking.

Learning to Hold Him in Love Instead of Pain

For a long time after the loss, I felt guilty whenever I caught myself feeling happy. Laughing with friends, enjoying a meal, having a good day. Any time joy crept in, the guilt was right behind it. I felt like if I was not feeling broken, I was being a bad mother to Leland. Like my pain was the only thing still tying me to him, and if I let it go, I would lose him all over again.

That belief held me for a long time. And then Lochlan came, and I had another son who needed me. A son who deserved a happy childhood and a mother who could be present with him. Slowly, I started to realize that I needed to work on my own happiness too. Not just for Lochlan, but for myself. Because Leland would not want a life filled with nothing but sadness for me. He would want me to live. He would want me to laugh and bake and read and rest and love his brother fiercely.

I realized that I did not have to hold Leland in pain. I could hold him in love. And love does not require suffering to be real. Love can look like joy. Love can look like a birthday cake with candles. Love can look like watching a shooting star and whispering hello.

If Healing Feels Impossible

If someone told me they did not know how to start healing, that the word itself felt too big and too far away, I would tell them that I understand. Because in the beginning, healing did feel impossible. And in some ways, it is. I will never be the same person I was before I lost Leland. A piece of my heart will always be missing, and there is no amount of therapy or time or ritual that will fill that space.

But the grief evolves into something more. What starts as crippling sadness slowly becomes a love that makes your heart ache in a different way. A way that still hurts, but also holds beauty in it. You start to find small moments of joy again, and they do not feel like betrayals anymore. They feel like proof that your heart is still capable of expanding, even after it has been shattered.

I picture Leland now watching over Lochlan. I picture him free of any pain or sadness, just surrounded by my never ending love for him. And when I hold that image in my mind, I feel something that I think might be peace. Not the kind of peace that means everything is fine, but the kind that means I have found a way to live with all of it. The grief and the gratitude, the heartbreak and the hope, the missing and the loving. All of it, together, in one life.

That is what healing looks like for me now. Not an ending. Not a fix. Just a slow, ongoing act of learning to hold it all.

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