Finding meaning without the platitudes
By Rachel · Updated 2026-07-21 · 2 min read
The short answer
Meaning after a loss is not the same as a reason for it. A reason is handed to you from outside and says the death was somehow meant to be. Meaning is something you build yourself, in how you choose to live afterwards, and it does not require you to be grateful for the loss or call it worth it. For many people it feels both sad and hopeful at once, a sharpened wish to live more fully alongside the missing that never leaves.
The card is still propped against the fruit bowl, three weeks now.
Someone meant it kindly. You can tell from the handwriting, how careful it is.
But you have never believed everything happens for a reason, and standing in the kitchen with the kettle going cold, you believe it less than ever.
There was no reason. There was a Tuesday, and a phone call, and then a before and an after.
Meaning is not a reason
So many of you have written to me about this exact thing.
You are done with being told your loss was part of a plan. That there is a lesson folded inside it. That one day you will understand why.
You do not want a reason handed down from somewhere above your head. A reason would mean it was supposed to happen, and you will not sign that.
And meaning is not a consolation prize either. It is not the thing you are handed to make up for what was taken, because nothing makes up for it.
Here is the difference, and it took me a while to find the words for it.
A reason is something you are given. Meaning is something you make.
A reason says the loss was worth it. Meaning says nothing was worth this, and you are going to build a life anyway.
The kind you build
The meaning is not in the death. It is never in the death.
It is in the phone you now answer on the first ring, because you know how a last unanswered call can sit inside a person forever.
It is in the trip you stopped putting off. The conversation you stopped swallowing. The friend you finally rang back.
So many of you have described the same quiet turn. Not a silver lining. A sharpening.
You are not grateful for the loss. You are just no longer willing to sleepwalk through the life you still have.
Nobody built this on your behalf. You did, out of the smallest ordinary choices, on days when you did not feel wise or brave, only tired and awake.
Sad and hopeful at once
People expect meaning to arrive feeling like peace. More often it arrives as both things at once.
You plant the tomatoes they grew, and you cry into the soil, and you keep planting.
You live more fully and you miss them more sharply in the same afternoon, and neither one cancels the other out.
This is the part no card can hold. That the reason never comes, and you go on making meaning without it.
Not to redeem the loss. Just to carry it somewhere that is still yours to shape.
Some of you live differently now because of them. Slower in some ways, braver in others.
The card can go in the drawer with the others.
What you do tomorrow is not a reason. It is just yours.
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