I buried Joe. I buried Miriam. Then I opened a business. That’s not the order that I planned, but grief doesn’t ask permission.

Joe was the love of my life. Miriam was my beloved sister, my first friend, and my surrogate mother. She knew me before I knew myself. When they were both gone, so were the people I had leaned on in my life without even realizing it. I had to learn how to stand on my own. Not because I wanted to. Because I had to.

Jay-Z opens “Public Service Announcement” with a line that’s been weighing on my mind: allow me to reintroduce myself. That’s what sixty looks like for me: a reintroduction. I’m still me inside: a daughter, a teacher, an academic therapist. But today I’m different from the one who started this career thirty years ago. Quieter in some places. Louder in others. More sure of what she’s here to do.

My mom always told me to use my God-given talents. She said it when I was young and unsure, and she kept saying it through my adulthood. I heard her voice clearly when I relaunched my tutoring and academic therapy work in January. I needed strength to move forward in the unknown future.

By February, clients were calling.

Isaiah 43:19 says, “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” I didn’t perceive it right away. I was too busy grieving to notice God was already building something. But new things don’t wait for us to feel ready. They spring up anyway.

Starting over at sixty isn’t the plan I would have chosen. Losing the people I loved most wasn’t a door I wanted opened. But self-reliance, it turns out, isn’t the same as being alone. I am held. I am working. I am still here, still building, still using the gifts my mother told me were mine to use.

God is good all the time. And all the time, God is good, even in reintroductions nobody asked for.