The Ripples My Mother Left Behind — On Why No One Truly Disappears, and Finding Meaning Through Grief

That morning I was thinking about my mother.

She passed some years ago now, and the grief is still here, it has not gone away. But something has shifted with time. It has lost some of its power over me. Not because I have moved on, but because I have moved through and in doing so, I found something I wasn't looking for.

I found meaning. And purpose.

She was “just my mum”

When my mother was alive, she was simply my mum. Not someone I would have described as powerful or world-changing. She was loving, warm, present, generous and a devoted school nurse in a small town, caring for children and students in a community far from the world's attention.

Like any mother and daughter, we did not always understand each other. We had our differences. That is part of the truth, too. But our bond was deep and unique, and I loved her immensely.

It was only when she became ill, that I began to see her differently. And then when she died, it really hit me.

I started to hear stories. Of children whose lives she had touched. Of families who remembered her kindness. Of moments, small, seemingly insignificant moments, and yet moments that had changed the direction of someone's life. And I realised, with a kind of awe, that I had never truly known the full dimension of who my own mother was.

That realisation cracked something open in me.

Yalom's ripples

The psychotherapist and existential thinker Irvin Yalom writes about what he calls rippling, the idea that each of us, through our interactions and presence, creates concentric circles of influence that spread outward long after we are gone. Like a stone dropped into still water, we touch others through the ripples, each one changed, and each one being a stone, sending out ripples of their own.

I thought about my mother and those ripples.

The children she nursed. The students she reassured. The parents she supported during frightening moments. Each of those people carries something of her, a kindness absorbed, a wise word learned, a feeling of being seen. And they have passed that something on, and on another too, without them ever knowing it came from a nurse in a small town who was, to me, simply my mum.

Her essence is still rippling. And the amazing part is that it will never stop.

Nothing is lost, everything is transformed

As Lavoisier once observed, “Nothing is lost, everything is transformed.” There could be something spiritual or metaphysical about this for some, and I reckon, it carries the weight of something profound. It is philosophical. It is also true.

The people we love do not disappear when they die. They continue, invisibly, in the changed lives of everyone they touched. And those changed people go on to change others. The ripples multiply... Infinitely. They travel outward across generations, touching lives that will never know the name of the stone that first broke the surface.

My own mother was made of those ripples. She was as grand as Humanity.

Every life lost is not, in fact, lost. Every life and death are transformative.

This understanding does not erase my grief. I want to be clear about that. My grief for my mother is real, and it is still present. But it sits differently now. It has become something I carry preciously with me rather than something that carries me.

What grief gave me

Here is what I have come to understand: without the pain of grief, I might never have sought the meaning that was waiting inside it.

The temptation when we are in pain is to reach for something that will make us numb, to pacify the ache rather than face it. I understand that impulse completely. I reached for those things too. And for a time, those ways of coping can simply be how we get through when the pain feels too overwhelming, and that is absolutely okay and sometimes necessary. But numbness, I witnessed, does not ease grief. It only delays the process.

What actually helped me was sitting in the pain. I sought support, and I sat with my grief rather than around it. I turned myself toward it. And at some point, I began embracing it, even when it felt unbearable, asking it what it had to tell me. And it was hard, incredibly hard. I am glad I was not alone looking back.

And what it told me was this: my mother's life had meaning. Even her death, in time, came to hold meaning for me. And my grief, that terrible, inevitable, and necessary grief, was the door through which I walked to find it.

That is why I became a grief counsellor from being “just a counsellor.” Not despite having grieved so many times, but because of it. Grief shaped me. It shaped my purpose. It shaped the way I now show up for others who are sitting in their own pain, wondering if it will ever lift.

Finding meaning through grief

My mother is still very present in my life. I notice her in the words I find myself saying to others. In the instincts I follow. In the way I hold space for someone who is suffering. Sometimes I catch a thought or a feeling that I recognise as hers and I smile thinking that she is rippling through me, and through the people around me, and outward from there in ways neither of us will ever fully see.

That is not loss. That is legacy.

If you are grieving someone you love and you wish to find meaning through grief, I offer you another way of seeing, a different lens.

The person's life you have lost is still rippling. Through you. Through everyone they touched. Through the small moments of kindness, the words spoken at the right time, the presence that changed something in someone without either of them knowing it.

They are here, in the fabric of the universe, forever.

And perhaps, when you are ready, you might begin to look for the ripples they left behind.

Sandrine Lonchampt is a grief counsellor and psychotherapist at Colibri Counselling & Psychotherapy, offering online sessions across Australia, in English and French.

If this resonated with you, I offer a free 25-minute consultation. Book a Free Consultation.

References

Lavoisier, A. L. (1789). Traité élémentaire de chimie [Elementary treatise on chemistry]. Cuchet.

Neimeyer, R. A. (Ed.). (2001). Meaning reconstruction and the experience of loss. American Psychological Association.

Yalom, I. D. (2008). Staring at the sun: Overcoming the terror of death. Jossey-Bass.