The Month of Love - and the Ones We Miss
Written by: Lori Howard, MA, LMFT #126074
February 15, 2026
Photo by Arnaud Mesureur on Unsplash
February, the month of love, is here. While many are savoring chocolates, admiring flowers, and swooning over poems, there are others quietly navigating a very different experience: missing someone they love.
Recently, I learned a French phrase - tu me manques. Its literal translation is “you are missing from me.” When I heard it, I finally found a way to express the truth about grief.
It’s not just me missing you. It's like an actual piece of my heart is gone.
As a therapist who specializes in grief and loss, my clients often talk about how much they miss their person. Sometimes that absence comes through death, divorce, a move, or a fractured friendship. Other times, the grief is more complex - it’s missing who someone used to be.
It’s the caregiver tending to a spouse with Alzheimer’s who mourns the conversations they can no longer have.
It’s the parent learning how to live in a quiet home after children have grown and gone.
It’s the slow ache that comes when someone is still physically here, but emotionally or cognitively different.
The person isn’t gone, but the relationship you once knew has shifted. And that loss is palpable.
They miss their person.
But tu me manques reframes something essential about grief:
You are missing from me.
There is now a space - an ache, a hollow - where you once lived in my heart. And while I miss you and wish you were here, I am also learning how to exist in a world that doesn’t feel quite right anymore.
Without that puzzle piece that is you - your shape, your color, your fit - I feel incomplete.
So how do we move forward when our puzzle piece is missing?
1. Allow all the emotions - both the hard and the gentle.
Grief is not linear. It is messy, cyclical, and surprising. Give yourself permission to feel it all.
2. Take time to care for yourself.
Rest, nourish, move, breathe. Even small acts of care are a way of honoring your healing.
3. Write a love letter to your missing puzzle piece.
Tell them what you miss, what you’re grateful for, what still lingers in your heart. Sometimes the act of expressing it frees you to carry their memory with more tenderness and less weight.
Love is not only found in presence - it is also found in longing. And for those who are missing someone this month, may you know that your grief is not a sign of brokenness. It is a sign of love that still lives within you.
Lori Howard, MA, LMFT #126074
Lori T. Howard is a Marriage and Family Therapist who specializes in grief and loss. You can visit her profile below or find her at lorithoward.com
