Yesterday

Yesterday is a place we return to when today feels unbearable.

It is where things still make sense. Where voices still sound familiar. Where routines exist and love feels intact. Yesterday holds what once was, and because of that, it often becomes a refuge when the present feels too sharp, too empty, too demanding.

In grief, yesterday has weight.

It carries phone calls that used to come easily. Ordinary moments that didn’t announce their importance while they were happening. Shared laughter. Predictable rhythms. The comfort of knowing someone existed just beyond reach. Yesterday is where they still feel real. And today, today is learning how to live with their absence.

We cannot go back to yesterday. That is the ache of it. But we look there anyway, not because we are stuck, but because yesterday holds proof. Proof that love existed. That life was shared. That something meaningful happened here.

Grief pulls us backward not to punish us, but to remind us.

It reminds us of who we were when love was present in a different form. It reminds us that the pain we feel now is directly tied to the depth of what we were given then. Grief is yesterday all over again, not as it was, but as it lives inside us now.

Yesterday is not only about loss. It is also about memory. And memory is a living thing. It shapes how we carry love forward when the person we love can no longer walk beside us. Yesterday becomes the place we visit when tomorrow feels too large to imagine.

There were so many yesterdays. So many moments that felt endless while they were happening. Only later do we understand how precious they were. Only later do we realize how much meaning lived in the ordinary.

Yesterday teaches us that nothing simple is ever insignificant.

In end-of-life care, yesterday often arrives quietly. It shows up in stories told again and again. In memories repeated, not because they are forgotten, but because they matter. Yesterday becomes a way of saying, This life was full. This love was real.

To sit with yesterday is not to move backward. It is to honor what shaped us. It is to allow ourselves to remember without rushing to resolve the pain that comes with it. Remembering is not a failure to move on. It is an act of love.

Yesterday holds unfinished sentences. Things that were not said. Moments that did not get their proper ending. And still, yesterday offers us something gentle: connection. Meaning. A place where love remains intact, even when presence does not.

Today asks us to keep going. Tomorrow asks us to imagine life unfolding without what we have lost. Yesterday asks nothing of us at all. It simply opens its door and lets us sit.

And sometimes, that is exactly what we need.

Yesterday reminds us that we lived fully enough to grieve deeply. That we loved in a way that left a mark. That our ache is not emptiness, but evidence.

We will never get yesterday back. But we carry it with us, woven into who we are becoming. It informs how we love, how we remember, how we show up for others in their own moments of loss.

Yesterday is not a place to stay forever. But it is a place worth visiting.

Because in yesterday, love is still whole.

And remembering is its own kind of grace.

xo

Gabby