Where Is My Safe Place?

Losing a father changes something fundamental inside us. Three months is not a long time in grief. Grief doesn’t move in a straight line. Some days you function. Some days it crashes over you like a wave. Both are normal. When we resist grief, it tightens. When we allow it, it softens slowly. Love does not end with death. Grief becomes lighter when we realize we are not losing the bond — only the physical presence.

Three-month mark is often harder

The shock fades. Reality settles in. Others stop checking in. You are expected to “be normal.”  This is actually when grief can intensify.

You don’t need to solve grief. You just need to survive it kindly. Your inner child lost her father.

Poem inked from......soul of a daughter who lost her father… From the woman standing in uncertain water....From the soul asking quietly — where do I belong now?

Where Is My Safe Place?

Where is my safe place now that the door I ran to does not open anymore?

Where is the house where silence felt warm and my name sounded protected?

The walls still stand somewhere, but the heartbeat inside them is gone. And without him, even memory feels rented.

I walk forward — cook, speak, smile, function — but inside I am still sitting beside him, waiting for his voice to say, “Don’t worry. I am here.”

Where is my safe place when the world feels conditional, and love sometimes comes with raised voices and fragile ground?

Where do daughters go when fathers leave without teaching them how to live in a world that feels louder than their courage?

I search in rooms. In people. In routines. In prayers.

But safety is no longer a place. It is a memory.

And maybe — just maybe — it must now become me.

Maybe my safe place is not a house, not a person, not a promise.

Maybe it is the quiet strength he left in my bones.

Maybe it is the way I still stand even while breaking.

Maybe it is the whisper inside my trembling chest that says —

“You are not abandoned. You are becoming.”

So I gather my scattered pieces, sit with my loneliness, and build — slowly — a room within myself where his love still lives.

And there, in that unseen space, I begin to feel held again.

– Juju’s Pearls

Because even in loss, a daughter learns to become her own shelter.