Buried Beneath Survival
By Kelli Knight
I’ve been thinking a lot about grief lately, but not in the way most people talk about it. People tend to think of grief as something that happens after a death, but I don’t think that’s been true for me.
Grief was losing my brother.
It was losing my dad.
It was watching my marriage end.
It was losing my home, my career, and the life I thought I was building.
It wasn’t one event. It was years of saying goodbye to people, places, identities, and futures I never imagined I’d have to let go of. The thing no one warned me about was that grief didn’t just make me sad. It quietly changed me.
Growing up, I loved animals in a way that almost felt excessive. I was the kid who wanted to rescue every stray, who cried over injured birds, who couldn’t understand how anyone could see an animal in need and simply keep walking. My love for them wasn’t a hobby or a personality trait. It was instinct. And then one day I realized it was gone.
Not overnight, and not dramatically. It had simply… disappeared.
That realization hit me harder than I can explain because if something so fundamental to who I was could vanish, what else had I lost without even noticing? I started wondering if this was just who I was now. Someone who cared less. Someone whose world had become smaller because that felt safer than risking another loss.
The hardest part was that it made me question every relationship in my life.
I never stopped loving my kids. Not for a second. But I knew I wasn’t loving the way I used to. I was present. I was protective. I would have done anything for them. But somewhere inside, I had built walls so high that even I couldn’t tell where grief ended and I began. That realization came with an incredible amount of guilt. I kept wondering what kind of mother feels like she’s surviving her children instead of fully experiencing them.
When we got Emma, I told myself she was for the kids.
I truly believed I’d take care of her, but I didn’t expect to feel much beyond that. I had already accepted that maybe I just wasn’t an animal person anymore.
Instead, she slowly chipped away at something I didn’t even realize had hardened. She didn’t heal my grief, and she didn’t bring back the people I’d lost. What she did do was remind me that the capacity to love hadn’t disappeared. It had been buried beneath years of trying to survive.
Looking back, I don’t think the greatest thing grief took from me was happiness. I think it was the version of myself that loved freely without constantly bracing for loss.
Emma didn’t give me a new heart. She gave me back access to the one I thought I’d lost.
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