It will never fail to surprise me that after 300,000 years in this world, we as a species are not numb to death and grief. It’s all around us every day, from horror movies, video games and other media to squishing a bug under your shoe. People are desensitized to the idea of loss from a very young age— some more than others.

Death is one of the only things that unites all societies, cultures and religions. While grief is handled differently, each culture honors and mourns.

Don’t get me started on the sanctity of bug lives if you have somewhere to be, I could keep you here for a while.

As the poem goes, “I pray nobody kills me for the crime of being small.”

But what do I know? I’m a vegetarian, not exactly the best person to weigh in on this topic. I’ll get off my soap box.

As a twenty-something adult, death feels so far away from us. Like it’s around the corner, but you still have to walk down the hallway first. It’s something you don’t understand until you are faced with it firsthand.

I am beginning to understand the fragility and inconsistency of a human life— by the time I fully understand it, it will be my time to go.

It took losing a loved one to not only understand how grief is felt in the body, but to also learn how I needed to be consoled. But even after knowing how it feels, it takes re-learning when someone close to you loses a loved one.

I had the honor of speaking with Susan Fox about her late son Nathan May who tragically passed away by fentanyl poisoning at 28 years old.

One of my most difficult questions to answer about grief has always been, what happens next?

The mail still comes, the milk expires, the coupons are out of date and now you’re late for work. Time does not stop just because it feels like it does, but when you are faced with tragedy… the world keeps turning.

I left my interview with Fox in a jumble of emotions, sadness, gratitude, confusion … but most of all, awe.

Fox told me that she invited the man who she suspected gave her son fentanyl to her house. She questioned him, prayed with him and even invited him to attend a recovery meeting with her in the future. Not only that, she asked the prosecutor to reduce his time served in jail— which was not possible for the crime committed. No amount of time served will bring her son back to her, but Fox has been relentless in her pursuit to find out the truth about her son’s death.

I question if I would be able to have that level of restraint in the face of someone who did something similar to my family.

I cannot begin to imagine the pain that losing a child would cause. Grief is different every time you feel it.

Fox told me that the only productive thing coming out of Hunter McSwain, the man who was convicted of giving her son fentanyl, is that he has the opportunity to change his life. She leads her grieving process with grace, kindness and the love for her son.

Grief has taught me a few things: take every opportunity to show people how you feel because any interaction could be your last with them, you get to choose whether loss hardens or softens you and you can keep someone’s memory alive by redistributing the love you have for them to other people through kindness.

As the law of the conservation of energy states, energy cannot be created or destroyed but may be changed from one form to another. Their love and energy is never truly gone, just around you in other ways.