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Coming Home to What Was Lost

Oppdatert: 9. juni

Dear friend,


I recently returned from a surprise visit to the United States—back to the prairie in North and South Dakota. I went to celebrate my mom’s 75th birthday. It was just me, my two brothers, and our parents—together again for the first time since I left home over two decades ago. No partners. No children. Just the five of us, like it used to be. The tenderness of that week is hard to put into words.


It took me three full days to arrive—not just physically, but emotionally and energetically. And now that I’m back in Norway, it’s taken nearly a month to truly land again in my life here, where I’ve lived for the past 21 years. This transition stirred something deep—something that’s still settling.


It brought me face-to-face with a quiet grief I’ve been carrying for years—what I’ve come to understand as ambiguous loss. A term coined by Pauline Boss, it describes losses that are unclear, not socially recognized, or hard to name. It’s the ache we feel when someone is physically present but emotionally gone—or, in my case, when the people I love are emotionally close but physically so far away.


I’ve been working with this grief—this deep grief—for the past five years, since lightning struck in 2019 and life, as I knew it, cracked open. That moment marked the beginning of what I now understand as a spiritual awakening—one that shook loose old patterns, beliefs, and identities. Everything started to shift.


But it’s only been during this past year, through my studies in Expressive Arts Psychotherapy, that I’ve begun to truly understand the full shape of what I had been holding. To be able to name what I’d been feeling all along: ambiguous loss.


To name it was powerful. To study it, even more so. I found that my body, my energy, and my emotions had been carrying this grief quietly for years—like a background ache I had learned to live with. And going back to the U.S. for my mom’s birthday became part of the healing. A circle closing.


I had felt a deep, almost unexplainable yearning—a longing for connection. Not in the rushed, fragmented way we often relate as adults, but a kind of slowed-down, fully present connection. I didn’t want to perform a role. I didn’t want to be busy. I just wanted to be in the presence of my mom, my dad, and my brothers—with nothing pulling me away.

And I got to have that.


That week was not only a celebration of my mom’s birthday—it was also a milestone in my healing. A lived experience of reconnection, grounding, and presence. A homecoming, both outer and inner.


Because here’s the truth I’ve come to hold close: I feel most at home now within myself. Over this past year of deep inner work, I’ve been reconnecting with parts of myself that once felt fragmented. Home, for me, is no longer a place on a map. It’s a place inside me. A place I’ve learned to return to again and again, especially when life gets messy or uncertain.


And maybe that’s the quiet, luminous gift of awakening—that we begin to feel it all. The joy, the sorrow, the gratitude, the longing—and hold it as one sacred whole.


If you’re in a similar place—navigating change, awakening, or grief—I want you to know: you’re not alone. These inner movements take time. They stir us, awaken old stories, and ask us to grow in unexpected ways. I’m still in the process of integrating all that was awakened in me.


With love,

Susan


 
 
 

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