The apartment in St. Louis was empty and quiet. There was no divorce left to finalize, no house left to sell, no move left to organize. Cheryl Killilea had closed her business in Western Wisconsin, taken her son to college in Boston and relocated to the city where her daughter lived with her one-year-old, husband and job.
For roughly two years, Cheryl had told everyone she was fine. Then the busyness ended, and "fine" became harder to sustain. Without another logistical problem demanding her attention, she finally had the time and space to feel what all that competent functioning had held back.
This is grief that often goes unrecognized because nobody died. A marriage ended. A child left home. A business closed. A familiar town was no longer part of daily life. The practical work may be finished, but the identities attached to a former life rarely disappear on the same schedule. Sometimes grief becomes clearest only after everything seems to have been handled.
Sometimes grief becomes clearest only after everything seems to have been handled.
Being "fine" kept Cheryl moving for two years
When Cheryl's husband of 18 years asked for a divorce during COVID-19, she was already dealing with the shutdown of her personal training and yoga studio in Western Wisconsin. She was supporting clients, managing several streams of income and helping her son through school. The divorce took longer during COVID-19, so she kept going through his senior year, prom and graduation, then took him to Boston for college.
From the outside, she looked capable. Clients told her how well she was handling everything. She smiled, taught classes, showed up online and continued working out. Between clients, she sometimes went into the bathroom and cried. Then she told herself to pull up her "big girl pants" and get back out there. Looking functional and feeling functional were entirely different things.
Killilea believed her son and clients needed her, especially while everyone was dealing with the effects of COVID-19. She did not want to burden them with her problems. Yet they could not support her if she refused to let them see what was happening. Calling herself strong helped her complete the next task, but it also hid the days when she could barely get out of bed. "Fine" worked until it became a hiding place.
Looking functional and feeling functional were entirely different things.
The empty apartment revealed more than a divorce
Cheryl moved to St. Louis in 2021 after living in her Wisconsin hometown for 30 years. Once the divorce was finished, the house sold and the business closed, the hardest part began. Logistics had given her somewhere to direct her attention. Now there was nothing between her and the pain. She started dating right away. She binge ate and over-exercised. Each distraction occupied some time, but she still had to return to the empty, quiet apartment.
What surfaced there went beyond the loss of a marriage. She had become a mother at 20 and had never lived alone. At 50 years old, she was doing so for the first time, while becoming an empty nester and adjusting to life without the business and community that had organized her days. She had thought of herself as Cheryl. But that identity depended on roles she had never expected to lose: wife, mom, business owner and small-town Wisconsin resident.
Those identities did not vanish as one tidy package. She had to grieve each one separately. Then, in 2022, a Facebook message reached further into her past. A man told her they shared a father. She initially set the message aside because she had no room to deal with it. The news changed what she believed about her first 50 years. The question was no longer simply what her life looked like now. It unsettled who she believed she had always been.
Those identities did not vanish as one tidy package.
A 2017 document turned grief into today's next step
While searching Google Drive for an old resume, Cheryl found a document she had created for clients in 2017. It contained the ACT framework: acknowledge, choose, today. She had developed it for people who felt stuck during change, long before her own life came apart in ways she had not planned. Now she needed to use the framework herself. Teaching a tool is one thing. Depending on it is another.
Acknowledge meant telling the truth: she was not fine. She was a woman going through divorce, grief and major life transitions in midlife. Naming that reality did not make her weak. It stopped her from treating pain as proof of weakness. Choose meant accepting that what happened was devastating and life-changing without allowing the past to dictate every remaining decision. She could not change the divorce or recover the identities she had lost, but she could decide how her story continued and begin reclaiming her life.
Today reduced that choice to a manageable size. Cheryl had once relied on five-year and 10-year plans, and the divorce had blown them apart. Trying to build another complete future immediately left her overwhelmed. A smaller question was more useful: What can we do today? We might journal, take a walk, make a phone call or meet a friend for lunch. Each small step is a promise to oneself. Keeping those promises day after day rebuilds the sense that we can rely on ourselves.
Four and a half years after her divorce became final, she was still finding new layers of grief and identifying further losses. Grief has no single schedule, and another person appearing fine after a similar loss says nothing about where anyone else should be. Comparing private pain with somebody else's public composure often leads people to perform "fine" more convincingly rather than admit the truth.
Comparing private pain with somebody else's public composure often leads people to perform "fine" more convincingly rather than admit the truth.
Cheryl now carries that mix of honesty and action into Changing Lanes Wellness and an online divorce community of over 6,000 women. The community gives women room to say what happened, then asks them to name an action step. The question is deliberately practical: What is the action step? They do not need the entire plan. They need the next thing that helps them move.
Life is gonna keep lifing us. Changes will arrive without permission, and sometimes people will remain functional until the apartment goes quiet. That delay does not mean they are grieving incorrectly. It may mean they finally have enough room to recognize what happened. Then they can acknowledge what is true, choose what comes next and decide what they can do today to pivot out of the funk.
