By Carrie Badillo

Content Note: This submission reflects the author's lived experience and perspective. It may include descriptions of suicide, grief, or trauma. The views expressed are solely the author's and do not necessarily represent the American Association of Suicidology. This material is for awareness and education and is not a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or visit 988lifeline.org for free, confidential support 24/7. Please do not reproduce or distribute this work without permission.

I was pregnant with our first child, and the world I expected to welcome him into had collapsed. My husband was gone. He had been the steady hand, the provider, the imagined partner in every small and large future I had held. Suddenly I was a single mother-to-be, forced to quit graduate school, forced to imagine how I would feed, clothe, and love a child when I felt as if my own life had been stripped of value. The future looked less like possibility and more like a long list of liabilities: welfare forms, nights of dread, the quiet knowledge that the safety net I'd believed in was fraying at the seams.

I was isolated — utterly and painfully alone. We did not come from families that offered refuge or steady hands; the people I should have been able to call for help were absent, conflicted, or simply unable to understand the depth of what I was carrying. What I longed for was simple: someone to sit beside me, someone to say, "you don't have to carry this alone." But instead, there was only silence, and the growing sense that I was invisible in the very moment I most needed to be seen.

My husband's death came like a thunderclap, sudden and violent, and then grief followed like a slow-rising river, spilling over its banks until it flooded every corner of my life. People told me to look to the future—be grateful for the baby, for any new beginning. They meant well, but gratitude was a language I did not yet speak. Shame braided itself with despair. I was a Hispanic woman on public assistance, a mother without a partner, carrying a fragile life inside and believing that the only mercy might be the end of my own. I thought often of why I should endure the humiliation, the exhaustion, the deep loneliness. I wanted the pain to stop. I wanted to be near the person who had died, and in my fogged thinking I believed that dying would be a shortcut to reunion and relief. It was all I thought about as I forced myself to go through the motions of daily living. But I wasn't truly living. I was heartbroken and had no will to go on.

And then one night after I had cried myself to sleep, I dreamed a scene so clear and luminous it became my lifeline.

I was chasing a child through a bright green park. The light had the soft clarity of late afternoon—sun through leaves, warm and forgiving—and the child ran ahead, laughing like a bell. He turned, and I saw familiar eyes that felt like sunlight on my skin. In that instant something in my chest unfurled: a sudden, undeniable flood of joy, of pure love that belonged to me. For the first time in weeks, I felt love not as something external coming from another person, but as a presence that came from inside me and overflowed outward.

When I awoke, what struck me was not only the image of my son but the unmistakable truth that the love I felt in the dream came from inside me. My son may have been the object of my love, but the source was me. This was a profound realization. Until that moment, I had believed love was something that came from someone else — my husband, my family — and when he died, I felt as though I had lost not only him but also his love. The dream showed me that love is not something that disappears with loss; it is something we carry, something we are.

From that moment on, I knew that love would see us through every challenge, every difficult decision — and there would be many. Love would not erase my grief or solve the practical burdens waiting in daylight, but it gave me a thread strong enough to keep moving. In a way, it was my first lesson in mindfulness: learning to anchor myself in what was still here, not what had been taken away. A hand pressed to my belly, a single breath, the warmth of my son's body against mine — these were reminders that love was not gone but alive inside me, accessible in the present moment.

That truth carried me through the messier realities of survival. There were nights when my son cried and I gave into frustration and joined, mornings when bills stacked on the counter seemed like evidence of failure, afternoons when I wondered whether I could ever be enough for him. But then I would place my hand on his chest, hear his breath, feel his warmth — and remember that the source of love had not left me. These ordinary moments became small practices of presence, simple acts of mindfulness that tethered me to life. Each act of rocking him, feeding him, or simply watching him sleep was not only care for him but care for myself.

As he grew, my understanding of love grew with him. What began as a private lifeline between mother and child expanded into a way of being. His laughter reminded me that joy was possible; his needs reminded me that care could be steady even when imperfect. Through him I learned that love is not measured in grand gestures but in presence — in showing up, in listening, in choosing patience when exhaustion threatened to undo me.

And slowly, that practice of love widened beyond us. I began to notice it in others — in the weariness of another young mother in a clinic waiting room, in the quiet grief of a neighbor who had also lost someone dear. At first it was only a glance, a nod, a brief exchange that said, I see you. But even those small connections mattered. Reaching out was not about fixing or saving; it was about offering the same presence that had carried me. Over time, those gestures grew into volunteering, listening, and simply sitting with people who felt unseen. Love, once my survival, became my service.

Looking back, I see now that survival was never a single decision made once and for all. It was a thousand small choices to stay — to rise for one more morning, to hum one more lullaby, to notice one more flicker of joy. Love was the thread that carried me through grief and exhaustion, and it is the thread that still carries me now.

If my story can do one thing, I hope it shows that survival is possible, not because despair disappears, but because love endures. We do not need to wait for love to come from someone else — it lives in us, even when loss and silence try to convince us otherwise. Love carried me through my darkest nights, guided me in caring for my son, and continues to shape my service to others.

And what I know now is this: we are love. My lived experience has taught me that love is not somewhere far away or something that can be taken by loss — it is here, in our breath, in our presence, in our choosing to stay. Because it is who we are, we can never truly be without it — and where there is love, there is always hope.