A woman asked on Quora: How does a person live life after the death of an adult child?
My answer: After the death of a child, you accept the world the way it is, without your child, and design a new life. This article will tell you about a woman that did this.

My life is about transforming politics. Part of that is to blog daily. So I’ll answer the question and then tie it into politics in the next article.

I have a friend who lost her daughter to cancer, just as the daughter was finishing high school.

My friend did a lot of work to see how her despair was due to her expectations about life. She expected she’d share her daughter’s life as she navigate college and boyfriends, a career, marriage and a family. She missed her daughter, and yearned to be with her, to listen to her, to share with her. So she learned to relate to her thoughts and feelings as thoughts and feelings. She learned to experience her expectations and sadness as expectations and sadness.

And she realized she didn’t want to let her sadness go. Life seemed very unfair. Hanging onto the sadness showed the unfairness and her suffering. She saw that by living a life of sadness, she was moving far away from the life she had wanted, far away from the joy she had with her daughter. By being “real” about her emotions, she saw that she could be real about her daughter being gone. She then let her be gone, dead. She “completed” her relationship with her daughter. That is, she let it be the way it was, a whole, complete experience, now past. In the sense that God gives us the world, God was giving her a world without her daughter and she had been refusing it. She then had the freedom to accept it.

Her daughter’s physical body was gone, but her joy and hope and goodness and energy could be created in any moment. My friend could create it, others in her family could create it, the daughter’s friends could create it. The essence of her daughter could live on if they created it.

So she did. She accepted that her daughter had died, and that the community that knew her could keep her essence alive. She keeps in close touch with her daughter’s friends. She made the anniversary of the daughter’s death be a day of community celebration and donation to charity. She brings memories and thoughts of her daughter as joy and love everywhere she goes.

Her daughter is dead. And her daughter lives on in the world, an anchor for relationships, an inspiration for lives, a source of joy and love.

In the next article, we’ll summarize and tie it into politics.