When Grief Turned Me Into a Robot (And What Finally Let the Light Back In)

Losing my mom broke me in ways I never thought possible.

I used to believe I was strong and that I could hold it all together, keep showing up for work, for life. And I did... or at least, that’s what it looked like from the outside.

But behind closed doors, the reality was very different.

I was falling apart.

Grief showed up in quiet, haunting ways, not just through tears, but in nightmares that left me gasping for air, in panic I couldn’t explain, and in a silence so loud it swallowed me whole. For more than a year, I shut down emotionally. I was alive, but not really living.

They call it functional depression. I was working, responding to emails, ticking off to-do lists. But it was all mechanical as if I’d turned into a robot. I did what I had to do, but the spark was gone. And when the world went to sleep, that’s when grief came to visit. The nights were the hardest. That’s when the weight pressed the heaviest, and the nightmares crept in, drowning me in waves of sorrow I didn’t know how to process.

I stopped going out. Slowly, without even realizing it, I started to retreat from the world.

The doors and windows in our home were shut almost all the time, like a physical reflection of what was going on inside me. I didn’t want to see the world, and I didn’t want it to see me. My husband, Val, ever patient and kind, would prepare our meals and bring them upstairs. I barely left the room. I stayed glued to my computer, working late into the night until I was too exhausted to dream.

It became a cycle.
Wake up. Work. Shut down. Repeat.

I told myself I was surviving one day at a time. But deep down, I knew something had to change. I wasn’t healing. I was stuck in a house and a life that had become a constant reminder of what I had lost.

So last month, we made a hard but necessary decision:
We moved.

A new house. A new space. A chance to begin again, even just a little.

This wasn’t about running from grief. Grief follows you. It lives in your bones. But maybe, just maybe, I could give myself space to breathe. To reset. To find moments of stillness without being swallowed by pain.

And today for the first time in 20 months, something shifted.

I woke up early.
I opened the windows. I opened the doors.

And for the first time in a long time, the light came in.

The living room wasn’t gloomy anymore. It looked warm. It looked alive. The air smelled different -  lighter, hopeful, new.

Val, with his background in psychology, once shared with me the House-Tree-Person (HTP) assessment, a tool used in therapy to explore someone’s inner world. He told me how in this study, the way someone draws doors and windows in a house says a lot about their emotional state. Closed doors can symbolize fear, isolation, and trauma. But open ones? They mean safety. Openness. A willingness to connect and begin again.

So here we are, in a new home with our doors and windows open.
And somehow, it really does mean something.

Today, I cried.
But this time, the tears were different.

They weren’t from grief, but from a quiet kind of joy, the kind that comes when you finally feel a little bit of yourself coming back.

Because I’ve come to understand something:
Grief doesn’t go away.
Healing isn’t about forgetting the people we’ve lost.
It’s about learning to carry them with us with love, not just pain.

We continue to love them not in the past tense, but in the everyday.
In the sunlight.
In the open windows.
In every small decision to live again.

One day at a time.