The Honor of a Life: Holding Grief, Love, and Memory in One Heartbeat

The Honor of a Life

It seems I’m in a season of goodbyes—standing face to face with the truth that nothing lasts forever. That all good things come to an end. 💔
It’s awful and terrible and gut-wrenching to realize my dad has been gone two years and my brother ten. If you’ve never lost someone so incredibly close, you won’t understand what it means when the candle blows out. 🕯️

A life force is a powerful thing. When it stops—when it really, truly stops—what’s left behind isn’t just spirit, gratitude, or faith.
What’s left is nothing. A void. A chamber filled with silence. And we’re meant to feel it.

The Ache of Loss

We’re meant to feel the loss of that brilliant creation, that impetuous youth, that arrogant adolescence.
We’re meant to feel the ache of losing the fumbling twenties, the family-making, the raising, the lessons learned. Because all of it—every single version of them—was carried in that one body. ❤️

And when they go, they take it all.
They take the laugh that rumbled from their diaphragm.
They take the piercing eyes that caught you in a lie before the words left your mouth.
They take the sideways comments that were half critique, half pride in your audacity.

When they go, so goes it all. And that? That is why we tell stories. 📖

The Power of Storytelling in Grief

Because a life is in the stories.
It’s in the retelling of the moments, the little absurdities, the unfiltered truths.
It’s how we remember those we've lost and how we honor a life well-lived.
It’s how we make sense of the world. 🌍
It’s how we find meaning in loss.

A Spiritual Knowing

A spirit guide once told me that when someone is preparing to pass, the next world is preparing to receive them.
That just as we make preparations for a new baby here, there are preparations being made on the other side. 🎇

Plans. Processes. Parties.
I don’t need scriptures to tell me that’s true. I know it in my bones.
I am in constant conversation with my Creator, and that knowing is as real to me as anything I can see, hear, touch, taste, or smell. 🙏

And yet…
That truth makes it no less painful to know there will soon be emptiness where a loved one once stood.

The Honor of a Life

What a journey. 🌿
What incredible fortitude. 💪
What priceless intellect. 🧠
What unmatched…
…everything.

It shall never be done again as it was.
And that, my friends, is the honor of a life.

May we tell the stories.
May we keep the memories alive.
And may we love so fiercely that when our time comes, we too are honored in the retelling. 💙✨

If you’re grieving someone, tell their story today. Speak their name. They’re never really gone when we remember them.

Blessings to all.

If you enjoyed this post, join my inner circle of people on a mission to design a life they don’t need to escape from!