Happy Father’s Day, Dad! I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for teaching me one of my most important life lessons- the importance of celebration. You celebrated EVERYTHING! There was always a reason to throw on Neil Diamond or your most recent 45 and have a spontaneous dance party in our living room. Upon winning my school election, I came home to a celebratory sign on our garage door. Every school success or failure was honored in some way- ranging from a choice of dinner to a silly home-made certificate telling me to get ‘em next time. I was traveling when I received my college acceptance letter, and you even wrote a poem just to tell me the news over the phone. At the Father Daughter dance at my sorority, you surprised me with our sorority letters in glitter on your cummerbund!!! I can’t thank you enough for all of your love and for showing me by example the importance of celebration.
As you can tell, it honestly did not matter how big or small the event, our family celebrated everything.
All of these celebrations were a blast, but more than it just being fun, these celebrations made me feel special and important. This positive reinforcement in our home allowed me to take more risks outside of our house because I knew I could home to a celebration, regardless of the outcome. There is no better way to handle life than through celebration.
It is no wonder then that I have found a way to turn the loss of my parents into an Angel Birthday celebration. It is the only way I can truly honor them. They loved a great party! I feel like it’s why I was supposed to have a childhood of crazy celebrations- it needed to be ingrained in me so I could find a way to bring the love and light of celebration into the darkness of grief.
My Dad was amazing and I want to celebrate him and all of the fathers out there today. None of this would be possible without you. I toast you and hope all of you enjoy your special day. Keep your party shoes on and remember that life is always worth celebrating! Happy Father’s Day!
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How does grief affect us? I mean, really affect us? Have you sat and thought about how much change grief creates and how we can all be touched, and perhaps even blessed, by it? What does grief ultimately do for us? It helps us appreciate the precious moments we are given, instead of wasting them away. It helps us cherish the people in our lives that we love, not take them for granted. It helps us not to worry so much about the little details that don’t really matter anyway, it helps us let go. To let go of the grudges, the...
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This week, my grief expert experience broadened to include chick grief. Yes, you read that correctly…chick grief. I didn’t realize I needed to add this to my repertoire but, like all things grief, it turned out to have very little to do with the actual chicks. This fall, my children joined 4-H. They are true animal lovers and, as a result of our chosen project, are raising baby chicks for a few months. What I did not anticipate was this project becoming a lesson in so much more than farm maintenance and responsibility for a...
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I hosted a meditation this week to help heal the challenging relationships we might have in our lives. It got me thinking. For some of us here, we may be struggling with having lost our loved one to death when our relationship with them wasn’t healed. Maybe we were in an argument. Maybe we hadn’t spoken to them in years. Maybe we wish we could have a redo of the very last conversation we had with them. Anyone? I know I have one of those! We can still very much grieve a person and be mad at them at the same time. But it can feel a...
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I gave the most heartfelt talk this week for a women’s church group on all the ways grief shows up in our life and on how God uses that very grief to bring us closer to him to prepare us and ready us for our larger divine purpose here. It was so amazing. And while grief shows up in so many different ways in our life, the same thing remains true. We must take the time we need to honor and heal our hearts and find a way to actually let the love in. That healing time can look so different for people. For some, it may be attending...
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So often when we are grieving, we are triggered by the simplest thing, at the simplest time. The smell of coffee, flowers in a store, a television commercial. When these moments hit us, we find ourselves grieving hard. It doesn’t matter if your loved one passed away 6 months ago or 20 years ago. In that moment, it hurts and it hurts bad. It’s bound to happen to every single one of us, if it hasn’t happened already. But what should we do when this happens? It can be so intense that we may feel inclined to wipe away...
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