When I was smack in the middle of raw grief, a friend gave me one piece of information that completely changed the way I view death and dying. You need to know this too, if someone you love has died.

When my mother died three years ago, it was sudden and unexpected. It was unfair. There were things she and I still needed to do and experience together. So much was left unsaid, including our goodbyes. I just couldn’t believe that she was irrevocably gone.

In the early days of grief, my hands kept twitching involuntarily to my phone, trying to text her or call her to tell her just how hard it was and how awful everything felt. But she was gone, and I questioned the point of a world which would so swiftly and completely devastate me with such an intense amount of pain and loss. I grew up thinking that life was about being happy, and I felt cheated to discover just how painful it could be. I struggled to keep going. I didn’t see the good in living if it inevitably led to such pain.

In the midst of my grief, a friend messaged me about the law of conservation of energy. At the time I wasn’t really ready to hear anything positive. I was at my lowest, but still I took in her words and sat with them over the weeks and months to come.

The thing you need to know is the first law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of conservation of energy. This law says that energy cannot be created or destroyed within a closed system like our universe. This law is absolute. It is a fact. This means that your mother’s or father’s energy could not have been extinguished in death.

But while the universe is a closed system, our human bodies are not. So what happens to our parent’s energy now? Grieving friend, I have good news for you. The energy is never extinguished. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It simply changes. It moves out of that open system, but it doesn’t go away. It doesn’t end. Your parent’s energy was redistributed in death.

I found it comforting to realize that my mother wasn’t gone. She had simply changed. She moved. Her energy was redistributed into the world around me. She may not be in New York right now, but she isn’t completely gone.

Each time, and it happens frequently, that I randomly pick up my phone or look at my watch to see that the time is 8:28 (which is my birthday, August 28th, the day we always called “our day“), I think of my mom and can almost feel the energy particles of her reaching out to make contact with me. I believe she is there.

She is in the sun’s rays that warm me. She’s the brown eyed susans growing in the garden and the rhythm of the Beatles on Spotify. She is the Pacific Northwest rain that falls on my skin. She is around me and inside me, as I realize I’ve started using mannerisms or phrases that were hers without meaning to.

Your parent’s light and energy echo around you and inside you, too. Those we love remain with us. That energy can never be destroyed.

Where do you see or feel or sense your mother or father in the world around you? They are there. Look for them. They remain.