The Grief No One Talks About: Loving Again

Written July 2025, before Poppy’s homecoming

There’s a type of grief that no one prepares you for. The kind that shows up quietly, unexpectedly, when your heart begins to open again.

I felt it in the days leading up to welcoming Poppy into my life.

It wasn’t the sharp grief that came when I lost Olivia. The kind that splits you in two and rearranges everything you thought you understood about love, loss, and forever. This was a different kind of ache. Quieter, more complicated. A grief woven into the folds of joy, guilt, hope, and healing.

I found myself feeling confused.

I knew adding another dog to my life would be a huge gift. But I also didn’t want it to feel like I had turned the page on a story where Olivia stops and a new one begins with someone else.

We don’t replace the ones we love.

The truth is, I’m not letting go of Olivia. I never will.

She is Olivia’s Healing Paws. She’s the heartbeat of everything I’ve built. And no new chapter, no matter how beautiful, could ever erase the one she wrote with me.

But there were moments where even the idea of joy felt like betrayal.

Simple things, like planning seasonal photos with Poppy, stirred emotions I didn’t expect. I used to take those pictures with Olivia. She was my tradition. And suddenly, I had to sit with the ache of knowing that moving forward doesn’t always feel like progress. Sometimes it just feels different.

It scared me that people might confuse Poppy as a replacement.

She isn’t. She couldn’t be.

But she is a gift. And I know in my bones that Olivia sent her.

There was sacred timing in the way this unfolded.

On July 7th, I arrived to meet her. And on July 8th, exactly 18 months to the night Olivia passed, I brought her home. A perfect soul wrapped in polka dots, arriving not to fill Olivia’s absence but to walk with me through what remains.

I didn’t realize how much I needed her until she was already here.

And I’m so thankful for the people who helped me navigate that in-between space. The blurry edges where grief and love overlap. The space where you can miss someone with your whole heart and still make room for new beginnings.

This is the grief no one talks about.

The grief of reopening.

The grief of learning that healing doesn’t mean forgetting. It means trusting that love, once planted, will bloom again in new forms.

When I saw the name Poppy, I was stunned.

Last spring, I decided that every dog I have in the future would be named after a flower. And even though I got my Poppy tattoo for Olivia last December, it had never occurred to me what a beautiful name it would be for a puppy. A puppy whose name just so happens to symbolize remembrance.

Through her name, she will always be a living remembrance of Olivia. Her life, her love, and all the lessons she’s taught me.

And now, Poppy blooms.

Because Olivia did first.

And I carry them both. Not in place of one another, but hand in paw, heart to heart, on this winding path forward.