Knocking On Doors That Won't Open

This idea has been running around in my mind like a child lost in a shrub labyrinth, turning left, then right, then back again, with no way out. At first it feels curious, almost playful. Then it wears thin, and all you want is for it to stop so you can wash your face and rest.

There’s a layer of grief people don’t talk about. It isn’t just the loss itself. It’s the questions that come with it. The ones that don’t have answers.

The past few months have pulled everything to the surface. Not just my mother’s passing, but every loss I never stopped to grieve. Deaths, broken relationships, people who simply disappeared. At the time, I kept moving. I had to. Work, children, responsibilities. Life doesn’t pause so you can fall apart neatly. I even went back to work the day after my husband’s funeral. When my brother died, I wrote his eulogy, cried in private, and went back to “normal” the next day.

But nothing was resolved. It was stored.

Now it’s all here at once. And what makes it heavier isn’t just the loss. It’s the WHY.

My brother took his own life and left no note. So the mind starts building stories. Was it planned? Was it a moment? Was it something I missed? The questions don’t settle. They multiply. One WHY leads to another, and then comes IF. And that loop doesn’t end.

Why did my father fight for custody and then disappear? Why did he stop showing up? He’s gone now. I can’t ask him.

Why did my son’s father walk away during my pregnancy without a word? A man who knew exactly what he was doing, who spoke life into that child, and then vanished. I saw him twice after that. Once to say he couldn’t stay. Once in court. Years later, a brief warning about someone else. No explanation. Now he’s gone too. Another door closed without an answer.

That’s the part people don’t prepare you for. Not just loss, but silence. Doors that shut without explanation. Conversations you will never get to have.

I’ve spent a lifetime wanting to understand people. What started as curiosity turned into something sharper. A need to know. And the truth is, the more I’ve seen, the less sense people make.

So the real question becomes this: why haven’t I accepted that I won’t know?

At some point, you have to quit knocking on a door that isn’t ever going to open. The WHY will keep you pacing the floor if you let it, circling the same ground like a dog that can’t settle. Acceptance is where the shift happens. Not approval, not forgetting, and not pretending it didn’t matter. It’s the moment you loosen your grip on questions that won’t answer back and decide to plant your feet in what is. You carry the loss, the silence, and the unfinished edges, but you don’t let them carry you.

Some doors don’t open. Life doesn’t wait anyway.