My mother died on a Sunday.
That sentence took me years to write without flinching. But it was never the Sunday that undid me. Sundays have a script. People arrive. Food appears. Someone prays. The day carries you because it has to.
It was the Monday. The phone stopped ringing. The world went back to work as if nothing had happened, and I stood in a quiet house realizing that grief does not live in the moment of loss. It lives in the morning after, when everything is supposed to be normal and nothing is. That silence is where the book comes from. It is why I called it MONDAY.
I was adopted. I have spent my whole life learning what belonging means when it is chosen rather than given. Being chosen is a gift, and it is also a question you carry. If love brought you in once, can it leave? When my mother died, the woman who chose me, that question got loud. Losing her felt like losing the proof.
Grief does not live in the moment of loss. It lives in the morning after.
So I did what a lot of people do. I walked away from faith. Quietly, without announcement. I did not storm out of the church. I just stopped showing up, first with my body, then with the rest of me. I stayed busy. I built things. I told good stories for other people. From the outside it looked like a life moving forward. From the inside it was a long Monday that would not end.
The walk back was slower than the walk away, and nothing like I expected. There was no lightning. No single sermon that broke me open. It was smaller than that. A moment of honesty here. A question I finally let myself ask out loud. The stubborn sense that the silence I was living in was not empty, that something in it was waiting, patient, the way my mother used to wait for me to finish being angry before she spoke. The book calls itself a way back to God because that is what it was. Not a return to the faith I left. Something quieter and more honest than what I had before.
Why write it down? Because I make my living finding the heart of other people's stories, and for years I refused to go anywhere near my own. That started to feel like cowardice dressed up as professionalism. The story you avoid does not go away. It sits underneath everything you make, waiting for you to stop pretending it is not there.
And because I kept meeting people living in their own Monday. The ones a week past the funeral, when the casseroles stop. The ones who left church and cannot say exactly why. The adopted kids, grown now, still quietly auditing whether they belong. Every time I told a piece of my story plainly, someone leaned in and said, me too. You write a book for the me too.
I did not write MONDAY to explain grief. I do not have an explanation. I wrote it to keep somebody company inside it. To say the silence is survivable. That walking away is not the end of the story, and the way back rarely looks like the way you came.
If you are in a Monday of your own, this one is for you.