How to Find Meaning and Purpose Again After Loss
Grief can make reading hard. Want to listen to this article instead? Find its corresponding podcast episode here.
A student in my online support community Life After Loss Academy recently wrote in the group:
"I came to Life After Loss Academy in 2024, shortly after death of my mom. She lived with me for 18 years, and I was her sole caregiver.
Taking her into my care changed the course of my life—physically, emotionally, and financially. My personal life was put on hold as I balanced caregiving, working two jobs, and maintaining the home we shared. My mom was my daily companion. Caring for her gave my days purpose, particularly after retiring.
Now, it feels strange and disorienting to be struggling with meaning and purpose when, for much of my life, I never did—and through my work, I helped so many others find theirs.
I've experienced tons of losses, including my dad's death when I was just six, the suicide of a close friend and former partner, many invasive surgeries, and the endings of significant relationships and friendships I once considered cornerstones of my life. As a professional, I have supported many people through grief, yet I am struck by how different my mother's death feels.
Despite journaling, reading, listening to grief podcasts, allowing myself to feel and release emotions, and communicating thoughtfully in hopes of bridging the gap in understanding with others, the loneliness and isolation remain.
I'm struggling to regain a sense of purpose and meaning in my life. How—or maybe where—do I start looking for meaning again? Is it even possible after a loss like this?"
As a grief coach, I love hearing this question. Because underneath the six-words "How do I find meaning again?" is something very precious and genuinely important:
A grieving person wracked by loss asking…
Who am I?
What am I here for?
Why did this happen to me?
What does this all mean for my life?
What am I supposed to do now?
If you've asked yourself any variation of these questions—whether your loss happened last month or decades ago—this article will help you understand how loss changes your relationship with meaning, why purpose can be such a tricky subject in grief, and why no one—even the people you care about most—can make meaning for you.
How Loss Shakes Your Sense of Meaning
When a loss happens, you don’t just lose a person, a relationship, a dream, or your health. Loss can also rob you of your sense of meaning.
This overnight or gradual collapse of purpose can leave you feeling adrift and unanchored in a world where everything used to feel solid. It’s extremely disorienting—and especially if you had a firmly rooted sense of meaning or purpose in life before loss, it can be truly life-altering.
For many people, the answer to the question “What is your ‘why’?” isn’t just a fun fact; it’s what gets them up in morning. When loss takes your reason for being, it can feel like a real identity crisis on top of a major loss.
In my book Of Course I'm Here Right Now, I talk about the four types of loneliness that show up after loss. One of them is spiritual loneliness—the feeling of being abandoned by god, by the universe, or by whatever sense of order or meaning you used to trust.
It's the "why me" flavor of loneliness, the one that tells you:
“You've been left to fend for yourself out here.”
“There is no higher order or explanation.”
“No one’s coming to save you.”
Spiritual loneliness doesn't require religion to show up. You don't have to believe in God, an afterlife, or fate to feel it. You just have to have lost your sense that life makes sense—that things happen for a greater purpose, that your days add up to something, that there's a "why" underneath the "what."
For the Life After Loss Academy student who wrote to me, this shows up as a cruel irony: she spent decades giving other people a sense of purpose and meaning, only to find herself unmoored the one time she needed that same gift for herself.
And to be clear, that’s not a failure on her part; that's the nature of loss. It doesn't care how much expertise, insight, or grief literacy you have. It still has the power to knock your sense of meaning right out of your hands.
Meaning After Loss Rarely Looks Like It Used To
Here's something I teach inside Life After Loss Academy that I learned after my mom’s death in 2013 and through a decade of supporting people through grief: your old versions of meaning and purpose aren’t coming back—at least not in their original form.
While this statement might feel like a slap in the face, it can also ring with a sort of weirdly comforting truth.
Think about it this way: you’ve experienced a loss, so your sense of meaning has experienced a loss too.
Framed a little more bluntly: you’ve seen some shit, so your sense of meaning has seen some shit too.
Meaning has been through something, just like you. And meaning that's been cranked through the wringer of life often comes out the other side looking different than it used to: more fragile, more quiet, less enormous, less clear. For you, meaning might not present with the same confidence or certainty it once had. It might feel more like a question mark or a temporary “stand-in” meaning than a definitive flag-planted-firmly-in-the-ground meaning. It may be shredded in tatters in the spot where it was torn apart—or it may have left the building of your life entirely.
Here’s some examples of what changes in meaning can look like after loss:
Intensity—You might cling to meaning drastically less or feel less attachment to it as part of your identity
Clarity—You might struggle to articulate a clear sense of purpose or “why,” especially when asked to write it down or speak it aloud
Strength—Your relationship with meaning may be delicate, “hanging on by a thread,” or nonexistent
Priority—You might see meaning or purpose as less important to daily life as you used to
As an example, the Life After Loss Academy student who wrote to me held caregiving as a clear, daily, undeniable purpose for eighteen years. That kind of meaning is loud. It wakes you up in the morning and hands you a job or a mission. Losing that kind of meaning doesn't just leave you with an empty afternoon; it leaves you with an empty life architecture—essentially the bones of a hollowed-out house where a rich, lively mosaic of a home used to be.
No wonder rebuilding your relationship with meaning doesn't happen quickly—and no wonder it cannot look the same as it did before. It’s been through the same loss you have!
If your sense of meaning feels smaller, quieter, or more tentative than what you had in your “life before,” that doesn't mean you’re failing at finding purpose. It might just mean it's early in your loss experience to hunt for meaning again—or it might mean that you know this inescapable aspect of grief: the meaning you hold after loss is built differently than the meaning you held before loss.
How to Start Finding Meaning Again After Loss
Inside Life After Loss Academy, one of the final lessons I teach you is how to leave the door of your life open to meaning, purpose, joy, and hope again.
Similar to other visualizations I’ve used that categorize life with grief as a neverending experiement—the Involuntary Scavenger Hunt from my book Permission to Grieve, the “dressing room” from my article about my favorite metaphors for grief—my meaning-making visualization is all about treating purpose as a trial-size sample or an audition, instead of needing to commit to it forever right away.
I won’t reveal the exact metaphor in this article, but hopefully the exercise below will help you get started. To access the full lesson, join me for guided grief support and on-demand lessons inside my Life After Loss Academy community.
The best way you can start to find meaning and purpose again after loss is to use the words “maybe” and “perhaps” as you experiment with potential meanings after loss.
This temporary, considering language makes the weight of these statements a little bit lighter, a little less set in stone. They turn a heavy, permanent-sounding statement into something you're allowed to try on and set back down.
For instance:
“Maybe this means I'm still connected to him.”
“Maybe this is a sign I should look for work in a different field.”
“Perhaps this is teaching me something about life or death that I don’t have words for yet.”
“Maybe this disease was always a part of me; I just didn’t know it.”
“Perhaps we were always destined to break up.”
“Maybe this doesn't mean anything at all, and that's allowed too.”
As you experiment with your own "maybe" and "perhaps" statements, a few questions can help you notice how each one actually sits with you:
Does this statement feel true in my body, or does it feel forced?
Does it bring me a sense of relief, or does it make me feel tense or dreadful?
Would I want to hear someone else say this to me, or does it only work in my own voice?
Is this a meaning I'm choosing, or one I've absorbed from someone else or society?
Am I open to this meaning changing later, or does it need to stay exactly like this?
There's no right answer to any of these questions. And the point isn't to land on a final meaning today. It's simply to notice—with curiosity instead of pressure—what's true for you right now, in this season of your life with grief.
Meaning Can Be Good—but It Can Also Be Bad or Neutral
Most conversations about meaning after loss assume meaning is automatically good; a warm, comforting thing—a sign from someone who died, a silver lining, a sense of "why you're here." And sometimes it is.
But meaning isn't always good. Sometimes it's bad. Sometimes it's neutral. All three are normal when you’re grieving, and all three deserve your attention.
Below are some examples of meanings you might make after loss, sorted into “good,” “bad,” and “neutral” based on how they ultimately make you feel and how they might impact your future actions—for the better, for the worse, and for the in-between. Each includes a maybe at the beginning, to continue the exercise from the previous section:
A good or positive meaning might sound like:
“Maybe this loss is teaching me how to be more present with the people I still have.”
“Maybe I can still talk to her spirit, and we're still able to communicate in ways I can't fully explain.”
“Maybe this loss is helping me develop more compassion/stop working so much/be more mindful about money.”
“Maybe that hard season happened so I could eventually meet [person] or join [group].”
“Maybe they died so they didn’t have to live through that painful surgery/that awful world event/others dying.”
“Maybe this loss is inviting me to think about my own death so I don’t leave others unprepared in the same way I was.”
“Maybe getting this inheritance means he would want me to follow my dreams and go back to school/buy a house/travel the world.”
A bad or negative meaning might sound like:
“Maybe this means I wasn't meant to have children/get married/start a business/move to [place]/apply to that job.“
“Maybe I'm the kind of person that bad things happen to.”
“Maybe this means there's no such thing as god/an afterlife, and I'll never see him again.”
“Maybe the rest of my life is nothing but suffering.”
“Maybe this family/friend group/relationship was never meant to last.”
A neutral meaning might sound like:
"Maybe this just means life is hard and complicated, and that's simply true."
"Maybe there isn't a bigger reason. This just happened, and now I get to decide what I do with it."
"Maybe meaning isn't about why it happened, but about what I build next."
The Worst Kind of Meaning-Making: “I Manifested My Loss”
One especially painful version of "bad" meaning deserves its own spotlight, because I hear it constantly from grieving people, and it rarely gets addressed in grief support spaces: the belief that you manifested or somehow attracted your loss.
If you've spent any time around Law of Attraction teachings, manifestation culture, or the broader "you create your own reality" messaging that's everywhere in our society, you may have wondered:
Did I cause this loss or bring this pain upon myself?
Did I think about this too much?
Did some part of me manifest my person or pet’s death, my divorce/breakup, my diagnosis?
This belief doesn't come out of nowhere. We live in a deeply individualist, bootstraps-obsessed culture—one that loves to hand people all the credit for their successes and heap on all the blame for their suffering. It's the same societal belief system that endorses the story that someone "gave themselves" cancer through stress—or “cured it” by changing their diet. Similarly, that poverty is simply a failure of mindset and wealth is purely the result of working hard. It's a small, sneaky leap then from "you create your reality" to "you caused your loss."
If any part of you has believed that your fear, your worry, your "negative thinking," or your intrusive thoughts somehow attracted a death, a breakup, a diagnosis, or another major loss into your life: it makes sense to me that you'd feel that. That belief is everywhere, and in our society, it's designed to feel true. But this belief isn't a reflection of your power over the universe or your life path. It's a reflection of how badly we as humans want loss to make sense—and how quick our culture is to assign blame instead of compassion, even (and especially) to the person suffering the loss.
Said another way: You did not think your loss into existence and your grief did not cause it.
I hope you can release that particular "meaning," fully, without guilt.
No One Can Make Meaning For You
If you've been on the receiving end of other people's meaning-making, you already know how uncomfortable it can feel.
For example:
“She's with the angels now.”
“Everything happens for a reason.” or “[X] happened so [Y] could happen.”
“He died for a greater purpose.”
“God doesn’t close one door without opening another.”
“They’re gone now, so you can finally travel/sell the house/go back to school/have a social life.”
“If she hadn’t died, you never would’ve met [person].”
“He would want you to be happy/move on/date again/try for more kids/[insert dead loved one’s hypothetical wishes here].”
These statements are usually well-intentioned. But they're also someone else's meaning, dressed up and handed to you like it's supposed to fit. And often, it doesn't.
You are allowed to reject meanings that aren't yours—even kind ones, even hopeful ones, even ones that other grievers swear by. You don't have to adopt a meaning just because it comforted somebody else in their loss—and you don't have to defend your own meaning-making process to anyone who's uncomfortable with how long it's taking.
Here are a few short scripts that might help when someone tries to foist their meaning on top of you instead of letting you find your own:
"That may be true for you, but I'm still deciding what [loss] means for me."
"It's okay that you believe that. I just need you to not ask the same of me."
"I'm not looking for a reason why right now—I'm just trying to get through today."
"I appreciate you trying to help me make sense of this. I'm going to keep sitting with it a while longer."
Meaning-making is not a group project. It's yours to build, at your own pace, in your own words, and most importantly, on your own timeline.
What Grief Professionals Alex Mammadyarov and David Kessler Get Right About Meaning
You're not the first person to wrestle with finding meaning after loss—and you won't be the last. Two particular voices I trust have written beautifully about it.
Therapist and author Alex Mammadyarov, who joined me on my podcast Grief Grower to talk about why grief waves keep showing up long after loss, opens her book Growing Through Grief: A Compassionate Guide to Finding Meaning and Purpose After Life-Altering Loss with a story that's stuck with me ever since I read it:
“Creating purpose after loss answers the question, What am I going to do now?
The loss doesn’t serve a purpose—we do.
When my mother was dying, my sister asked her, ‘How am I going to do this? How am I going to live without you?’ She was only twenty-five years old and preparing to be my legal guardian. My mother told her that I would give her purpose.
My mother wasn’t telling my sister that becoming my guardian was the reason she was dying, that it was some grand lesson concocted by her illness. Caring for me was simply what my sister was going to do with this loss.”
I love this distinction so much, because it separates two things people often accidentally fuse together: 1) the reason a loss happened, and 2) the purpose we choose to build afterward.
Your particular loss doesn't need to have a reason for you to build meaning from it. In other words, the loss doesn't have to serve a purpose. You get to.
If you'd like to go deeper into why grief waves resurface—even years into meaning-making—read the blog based on my conversation with Alex here.
I'll also point you toward my friend and fellow grief educator David Kessler's book, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. I haven't read it cover to cover myself yet, but David's work has shaped grief education for years, and his central idea—that meaning can become a genuine, healing sixth stage alongside the traditional five stages of grief—is worth exploring if you're hungry for more language and structure around how to find purpose after loss.
Meaning Is a Sticky, Evolving, Lifelong Project
At the end of the day, meaning is not something you find once and check off a list.
Meaning-making is folded into some of the biggest, oldest, most unanswerable questions humans carry—questions about purpose, about "why," and about what being alive is even for. Those questions don't resolve in a week, a year, or sometimes ever. And that's not a failure of your grief process or your inability to “just look on the bright side.” That's just what these questions are like, particularly for those of us who’ve faced one or more significant, life-changing losses.
Living with grief’s questions and uncertainties in the long-term is exactly why the last piece of my 5-step GRIEF Method—Foster—exists. The Foster module is where Life After Loss Academy students learn to build a lifelong relationship with grief instead of racing toward a finish line of “I’m done grieving!” that was never there to begin with. It's the step where meaning and purpose get to stay unfinished, flexible, and open to revision—because you keep living, and life keeps handing you new information.
The lessons inside the Foster module don’t demand that you land on one set meaning and defend it forever. Instead, the videos, journaling prompts, and exercises invite you to keep the door open—to experiment, to sample, to change your mind, and to let your sense of purpose evolve as many times as it needs to over the course of your life alongside grief.
Because healing is never about “getting over it;” it’s about growing alongside it.
Closing Thoughts: Meaning Is (Literally) What You Make It
To the student who wrote to me, and to every other griever asking, "Is it even possible to feel purpose again after a loss like this?"—here's what I want you to know: yes, it's possible. But it's not going to arrive on a deadline, no one can hand it to you, and it's not going to look like it used to.
You don't have to find meaning inside of your grief today. You don't have to find it alone, either.
Inside Life After Loss Academy, we sit with and work through life’s toughest questions surrounding meaning, purpose, spiritual loneliness, and what it looks like to foster a lifelong relationship with grief—together.
I created an entire video lesson called "What If: I've Lost My Sense of Purpose and Meaning?” you can watch on-demand, and you’ll be surrounded by a welcoming community of people who can relate to what you're carrying.
If you're ready to start rebuilding your sense of meaning and purpose, I'd love for you to join us in Life After Loss Academy.
And if you're not sure it's the right fit for you in this season, watch my free Grow Through Grief workshop to get a taste of what you’ll learn inside and get an overview of my signature GRIEF Method framework.
