Grace & Grit Letters - Where grace meets grief by Angie Hanson Podcast

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the word “expert.”

More specifically, I’ve been thinking about what it means when someone calls themselves a grief expert.

I understand why the term exists. There are people who have spent years studying grief, supporting grieving families, conducting research, counseling clients, and learning how loss affects us emotionally, physically, spiritually, and relationally.

That knowledge matters.

Training matters.

Lived experience matters too.

But the longer I spend in the grief space, the less comfortable I become with the idea that any one person can be an expert on grief as a whole.

Because whose grief are we talking about?

The mother whose child died?

The widow who lost the person she had built her entire adult life beside?

The adult child who had a complicated relationship with the parent who died?

The sibling who suddenly became the only person left carrying certain childhood memories?

The person grieving someone who is still alive but no longer safe, available, or part of their life?

Even two people who have experienced the same kind of loss can grieve in completely different ways.

Two mothers can lose children and still have very different stories.

Two widows can lose husbands and need entirely different kinds of support.

Even our own grief changes over time. The grief we carry in the first weeks is not the same grief we carry ten years later. It may have the same name, but it lives differently inside us.

How, then, could one person possibly be the expert on all of it?

I have lived through the deaths of my son, my late husband, my brother, and my sister-in-law. I’ve walked through anticipatory grief, traumatic loss, caregiving, widowhood, child loss, sibling loss, and the strange work of rebuilding a beautiful life after so much of the first one disappeared.

I’ve studied grief. I became a certified grief coach. I’ve written about loss, spoken about it, created cards for grieving people, and spent years listening to people tell me the parts of their stories they don’t always feel safe sharing elsewhere.

All of that has given me experience.

It has given me knowledge.

It has not made me the expert on someone else’s grief.

I think the healthiest people working in this space understand that distinction.

They can say, “Here is what I know,” without assuming it must also be true for you.

They can offer tools without presenting them as instructions.

They can share what helped them without promising that it will heal everyone else.

And perhaps most importantly, they can recognize when someone needs a kind of care they are not qualified to provide.

Grief can overlap with trauma, depression, anxiety, substance use, complicated family dynamics, and serious mental health concerns. Those situations deserve thoughtful, qualified care. Caring about someone does not automatically qualify us to treat everything they may be carrying.

Sometimes the most responsible thing we can say is, “This is beyond my scope, but I want to help you find someone who is equipped to support you.”

If these honest conversations about grief, life after loss, and finding our way forward resonate with you, I’d love to have you join me here.

That is not failure.

That is care with humility.

I’ve been asking myself some hard questions about where I fit into all of this.

When I became certified as a grief coach, I thought one-on-one coaching would become an important part of my work. It seemed like the natural next step.

But if I’m honest, the traditional one-on-one coaching atmosphere has never felt completely aligned with me.

I can do it. But I’m beginning to understand that being capable of doing something doesn’t always mean it is where I’m meant to stay.

What continues to feel right to me is gathering people together.

I love group settings. I love what happens when one person says something honest and another person’s face changes because, finally, someone has put words to what they have been feeling.

There is relief in discovering, “It isn’t only me.”

There is something deeply meaningful about creating a room where no one has to perform healing, meet a timeline, or pretend to be doing better than they are.

In those spaces, I don’t need to be the person with all the answers.

Honestly, thank goodness, because I don’t have them.

My role is to help hold the conversation. To offer education and tools. To share what I’ve learned. To ask thoughtful questions. To remind people that their responses to loss are human, even when those responses feel messy, contradictory, or impossible to explain.

The wisdom does not flow from one person at the front of the room.

It moves around the room.

That feels like the kind of grief work I want to keep doing.

So I’ve decided to step away from offering one-on-one grief coaching and focus more intentionally on my monthly group sessions, grief education, writing, speaking, and the work I do through Butterflies + Halos.

This isn’t me leaving grief work.

It is me becoming more honest about where I belong within it.

And maybe that is part of grief too.

Ironically, my word for this year is pivot.

At the time I chose it, I didn’t know exactly what I would be pivoting toward, or what I might need to pivot away from. I’m learning that a pivot doesn’t always require a dramatic ending or a completely new beginning. Sometimes it is simply an honest adjustment. A willingness to acknowledge that something served its purpose, taught you what you needed to learn, and helped point you toward the work that fits you better.

Apparently, pivot wasn’t merely my word for the year. It was preparing me for it.

We try something. We listen to ourselves. We notice what feels life-giving and what quietly drains us. We give ourselves permission to change direction when the path no longer feels true.

A certification does not have to become a lifelong business model to have been worthwhile. What I learned through that training continues to shape how I write, speak, facilitate conversations, and support grieving people.

Nothing was wasted.

It simply led me somewhere slightly different than I expected.

I have also had to ask myself another uncomfortable question:

Am I bothered by some of the people who call themselves grief experts because I disagree with how they approach this work? Or am I jealous because they appear to be further along than I am?

The honest answer may occasionally be both.

There are people doing beautiful, responsible work in the grief space. There are also moments when grief begins to look more like a marketing opportunity than a human experience. Someone’s tragedy becomes content. Their pain becomes an opening for another person to be noticed. Support quietly turns into self-promotion.

That makes me uncomfortable.

But I also know I have to examine my own heart before I point at anyone else’s motives. I don’t always know what is happening behind someone’s social media post, just as they don’t know everything behind mine.

What I can do is decide how I want to show up.

I want to speak with confidence about what I know and honesty about what I don’t.

I want to share my experiences without turning them into rules for someone else.

I want to support grieving people without making them feel like a project to complete.

I want to remain teachable.

And I never want someone to believe that I understand their loss better than they do simply because I have credentials, a book, a business, or a collection of losses of my own.

My grief gives me a place from which to speak.

It does not give me authority over yours.

This matters for those of us who are simply writing our way through loss too.

You don’t have to be a coach, counselor, or “expert” to share what grief has taught you. You are allowed to tell your story. You are allowed to write the truths you had to learn the hard way. You are allowed to say, “This is what helped me,” or “This is what I wish someone had understood.”

Your experience may become a light for someone else.

The difference is remembering that a light helps another person see their own path. It does not demand that they follow yours.

Perhaps that is the posture I want to carry into this next chapter:

I’m not the expert on your grief.

You are.

I bring lived experience, education, compassionate conversation, and tools that may help you understand and carry it.

I can sit beside you.

I can listen.

I can remind you that you are not broken because grief continues to change shape.

I can help create spaces where we tell the truth and feel a little less alone.

But I will never know your person, your history, your heart, or the full weight of what you lost in exactly the way you do.

And I don’t need to claim that I do in order to offer something meaningful.

Maybe the people we trust most with our grief are not the ones who announce that they understand it all.

Maybe they are the ones who come close, stay curious, and gently say:

“Tell me what this has been like for you.”

That may not sound especially expert.

But it sounds a whole lot like care.

Grace & Grit Letters is a place for honest conversations about grief, resilience, and rebuilding a life you didn’t expect to live. Subscribe to receive the next letter.

There is a strange thing that happens when a family loses someone. We all walk out of the same hospital room, funeral home, church, or cemetery believing we have lived through the same ending. But we haven’t. Not exactly. We each carry away our own version.

One person remembers the final conversation. Another remembers the phone call. Someone else remembers who arrived first, who didn’t come at all, what the doctor said, or what the minister forgot to mention. One person remembers peace. Another remembers panic. One remembers the casseroles lining the counter and the way the community showed up. Another remembers standing in a crowded room and feeling completely alone.

The person we loved may have died only once, but the ending keeps living in many different minds. And sometimes those memories do not agree.

We think shared loss means shared memory

After someone dies, families often speak in collective language. We went through this. We lost him. We were there. All of that can be true. But grief is deeply individual, even when the death belongs to an entire family.

The wife did not lose the same person the daughter lost. The mother did not lose the same person the sibling lost. The friend who knew the younger, wilder version of them is not mourning the exact same person as the neighbor who knew them later in life.

Every relationship held a different piece of who they were. So, of course, every person also holds a different piece of how they left.

That doesn’t mean anyone is lying. It doesn’t necessarily mean someone has remembered it wrong. Trauma can blur some details and sharpen others until they feel carved in stone. Love has its own camera angle, too. We remember what our hearts were able to notice while they were breaking.

My memories belong to me

There are moments from Garret’s death that I will carry for the rest of my life. There are details Jack and I shared because we were his parents, standing inside the same nightmare. But even Jack and I did not experience every moment in the same way. We were a mother and a father. We had different relationships with our son, different fears, and different ways of trying to survive what should never have happened.

Then, when Jack died, I held another ending from a place no one else could fully stand. Other people lost Jack, too. Graci lost her dad. His parents lost their son. Friends lost someone they loved.

But I lost my husband.

I remember lying beside him in his hospice bed. I remember telling him I loved him forever. I remember telling him I would be brave, even though I had no idea how. I remember giving him permission to go be with Garret and asking him to tell our boy that his mommy loved him and missed him.

That is part of Jack’s ending as I lived it.

Someone else may remember the medical details. Someone may remember a conversation from days earlier. Someone may remember arriving, leaving, praying, waiting, or watching the clock. Those memories belong to them. Mine belong to me.

Grief becomes especially lonely when someone tries to correct the part of the story that lives inside your bones.

Families sometimes argue over facts when they are really protecting pain

After a death, the smallest details can suddenly feel enormous. Who was in the room? What were the last words? Did they know they were dying? Were they peaceful? Who made the decision? Why wasn’t I called sooner? Why didn’t anyone tell me?

Sometimes these are questions looking for facts. But often, underneath them, there is something much more tender:

* Did I matter?

* Was I loved?

* Did I do enough?

* Did they leave knowing how much I cared?

That is why conversations about the ending can become so charged. We are not simply comparing memories. We are defending our place in the life of someone who can no longer reassure us.

Grief is already painful enough without turning it into a courtroom where everyone must prove their version. There may be facts that matter, of course. But there are also emotional truths that can sit beside one another without canceling each other out.

You can remember peace while I remember fear. You can be grateful for the care they received while I remain angry about what happened. You can cherish the final days while I can barely speak about them.

We can both love the same person fiercely and still tell the ending differently.

If you’ve ever felt alone inside your version of a loss, Grace & Grit Letters is a place where your truth doesn’t need to be defended. Subscribe to receive new letters about grief, healing, and the beautiful life we continue building.

The ending is not the whole story

One of grief’s cruel little tricks is how easily the final chapter can begin to overshadow the entire book. The diagnosis becomes bigger than the birthdays. The hospital room becomes clearer than the family vacations. The last breath grows louder than all the laughter that came before it.

I understand why. Endings are heavy. They demand attention. They divide life into before and after without asking anyone’s permission—which is frankly very rude of them. But the way someone died is not the sum of the way they lived.

Our memories of the ending may never match perfectly. Maybe they aren’t supposed to. Perhaps our work is not to force every memory into one approved family version. Perhaps it is to make room around the table for each person’s piece of the story.

To listen without correcting. To become curious instead of defensive. To say, “I didn’t experience it that way, but I believe that is how it felt to you.”

And then, when we can, to remember something beyond the ending. The way they laughed. The stories they told more than once. The meal they always ordered. The music they loved. The ordinary ways they made a life.

Because the ending matters. It changed us. It deserves to be spoken about honestly. But it does not get to claim every page.

Maybe remembering differently is another way of remembering completely

No single person holds the whole story of someone else’s life. We each carry a chapter, a handful of scenes, a version of the ending, and a love shaped by the relationship we had.

Together, those memories may be messy. They may contradict one another. They may occasionally make Thanksgiving dinner feel like an emotional hostage situation. But they also reveal something beautiful.

This person mattered in more than one way. They were known from more than one angle. They left fingerprints on many different lives.

So perhaps the goal isn’t to decide who remembers the ending correctly. Perhaps the goal is to honor that each of us walked away carrying something different because each of us loved something different about the same person.

The ending may never become one neat, agreed-upon story. Neither will grief.

But we can still hold our separate memories with tenderness. We can let one another tell the truth as we lived it. And we can remember that before there was an ending, there was an entire life.

That is the story worth continuing to tell.

When my husband Jack died, I didn’t stop being part of his family.

Technically, I suppose the words changed. I became the widowed daughter-in-law. Later, when I remarried, the labels became even more complicated.

But love doesn’t pay much attention to technicalities.

Neither does responsibility.

Life continued after Jack died because life has the audacity to do that. It keeps moving, keeps changing, and occasionally keeps throwing more crap at people who have already had more than their fair share.

Jack’s sister died.

Then his father died.

And suddenly, my mother-in-law, Suzanne, was living in a world where her husband and both of her children were gone.

Her entire immediate family—except for me and her only living grandchild, my daughter, Graci.

She has extended family. There are cousins and people who care about her. But the circle that once made up her everyday life has significantly dwindled.

And that kind of loss changes a person.

It changes how you see the future.

It changes how much energy you have to care for a house, open the mail, make decisions, manage appointments, and keep participating in a life that no longer looks anything like the one you were supposed to have.

Suzanne lives alone in a large house filled with the evidence of a family that used to be there.

That sentence alone carries more grief than I know how to explain.

Someone still has to handle everything

Grief can stop a person in their tracks, but the bills don’t stop.

The house still needs to be maintained.

Appointments still need to be scheduled. Paperwork still arrives. Financial decisions still have to be made. Groceries must be bought. Prescriptions need to be filled. Repairs happen. Forms need signatures. Life continues to produce passwords, phone calls, insurance questions, and envelopes marked IMPORTANT—because apparently grief wasn’t already providing enough paperwork.

Someone has to take care of it all.

For Suzanne, that someone has largely been me.

I help manage her finances and her living needs. I keep track of the things she either cannot manage alone or no longer has the emotional energy to care about. I step in because Graci is 24. She loves her grandmother deeply, but she doesn’t yet know how to handle all the complicated, grown-up pieces of someone else’s life.

Honestly, I’m not sure any of us truly know how. We simply learn because there is no one else standing in line to volunteer.

Sometimes I have wondered: Is this really my responsibility?

I was Jack’s wife. I am no longer her daughter-in-law in the traditional sense. I have remarried. I have a husband, a home, a business, a daughter, and a life that continued growing after Jack died.

But Suzanne is still family.

I love her.

So yes, it is my responsibility—not because a rulebook assigned it to me, but because love did.

That doesn’t mean it is easy.

Love and burden can exist in the same room. So can devotion and exhaustion. Caregiving can be something you willingly choose and something that completely overwhelms you.

Both can be true.

If you’re carrying grief, caregiving, or both, you don’t have to carry the words alone.

Grief can look like not caring anymore

We are now reaching another milestone.

We are moving Suzanne into an assisted living community.

It isn’t because she is completely unable to take care of herself. It is because, in many ways, she has stopped caring whether she does.

I don’t say that with judgment. I understand it.

When you have lost your husband and both of your children, it becomes difficult to believe there is anything left to build toward. Her grief has been deeply traumatic. She has survived loss after loss, but survival and living are not always the same thing.

She needs people.

She needs community.

She needs to hear voices in the hallway and see familiar faces at meals. She needs activities she can choose to attend and someone nearby if she needs help. She needs a life that doesn’t require her to maintain a huge house while surrounded by the quiet absence of everyone who once filled it.

The house has become too much for her.

The cleaning has become too much. The upkeep has become too much. The loneliness has become too much.

And watching it happen has become too much for me.

I know moving will bring another layer of grief for her.

She isn’t simply moving from a house into an apartment. She is leaving a life.

She is leaving rooms where her family gathered. She is sorting through objects that belonged to people she loved. She is closing the door on a chapter she never wanted to end.

A smaller space can feel like a smaller life, even when it may actually allow life to expand again.

I know this transition will be painful.

But I also believe it is necessary.

The relief no one wants to admit

Honestly, this move is also taking a tremendous weight off me.

And admitting that brings its own guilt.

I feel relieved knowing there will be people around her.

I feel relieved knowing someone else may notice if she hasn’t come to breakfast, isn’t feeling well, or needs help.

I feel relieved knowing the house will no longer be silently declining around her while I worry about what needs to be repaired, cleaned, handled, or prevented next.

I feel relieved that I will not be carrying all of this alone.

My husband, Chantz, has helped me. He has stepped into a situation he never created and accepted responsibilities that did not come from his own family. That kind of love deserves to be named.

Still, much of the mental and emotional weight has been mine.

The phone calls.

The decisions.

The worrying.

The constant awareness that if something needs to be handled, I am likely the person who will have to handle it.

So yes, I am relieved.

That does not mean I love Suzanne any less.

It does not mean I am abandoning her.

It means I have been carrying something heavy for a very long time, and someone has finally offered to hold one end.

Relief is not rejection.

Relief is not selfishness.

Relief is what happens when a caregiver realizes help may finally be coming.

Caregiving has its own grief

We often talk about caregiving as though it is made entirely of noble moments.

We talk about love, sacrifice, and showing up.

We don’t always talk about resentment, fatigue, guilt, fear, or the quiet wish that someone else would make the decision for once.

We don’t talk enough about what it feels like to take responsibility for a person whose needs are growing while you are also trying to live your own life.

And we rarely talk about the grief of watching someone slowly lose interest in the life they still have.

Caregiving is grief in motion.

It is grieving what someone used to be able to do.

It is grieving the home they can no longer manage.

It is grieving the independence they are afraid to lose.

It is grieving the family members who should have been here to help.

Sometimes I think about how different this would be if Jack were alive. Or if his sister were still here. Or if Suzanne’s husband were beside her.

There should be more people at this table.

But there aren’t.

That absence becomes its own kind of responsibility.

For those carrying what loss left behind

Maybe you are caring for an aging parent, grandparent, sibling, friend, or someone connected to a person you lost.

Maybe you became the responsible one without ever agreeing to the job.

Maybe everyone assumes you will handle things because you always have.

Maybe you love the person deeply and are still tired of being the one who remembers every appointment, pays every bill, answers every call, and solves every problem.

You are allowed to admit that it is hard.

You are allowed to need help.

You are allowed to feel relieved when help finally arrives.

You are allowed to grieve the changes even when you know they are necessary.

And you are allowed to love someone without being able to carry every part of their life by yourself.

We are moving Suzanne because we love her.

Because she deserves more than sitting alone inside a house filled with ghosts.

Because community cannot replace her husband or her children, but it may remind her that she is still part of the living.

And because caregiving should not require one person to slowly disappear beneath the weight of keeping another person afloat.

This next chapter will be hard.

It will be sad.

It may also be good.

That is the strange thing about grief: sometimes the right decision still breaks your heart.

And sometimes the sound of help arriving feels a lot like guilt—until you finally recognize it as relief.

If this letter made you think of someone carrying more than most people realize, please share it with them. Sometimes being seen is its own kind of help.

Are you caring for someone while grieving, too? What part has been hardest to say out loud?

Dear Friend,

There are words I used to say without thinking. Words that rolled off my tongue as naturally as breathing: Tomorrow. Home. Family. How are you? Forever.

They were just words. Until grief happened.

Almost overnight, the language I had spoken my entire life began to change. Not because the dictionary changed, but because I did. Grief has a way of rewriting the meaning of ordinary things.

Take the question, “How are you?” Before loss, it was simple. A polite greeting. Something you answered without much thought. Now, it feels like one of the hardest questions in the world. Because how do you explain that your heart is carrying someone who isn’t standing beside you? How do you tell someone that you laughed this morning, and cried in the car an hour later? That you’re grateful for this beautiful life you’ve built, and still miss the one you lost with every fiber of your being?

So instead, we often smile. We offer little phrases that fit into polite conversation, but never quite tell the whole truth: “I’m good.” “I’m okay.” “I’m hanging in there.”

Even the word “home” changed for me. Sometimes grief changes your home long before it changes your address. The walls are the same. The furniture hasn’t moved. But the laughter is quieter. The chair at the table is empty. The familiar suddenly feels unfamiliar. You realize that home was never just a place. It was the people inside it. And when one of them is gone, the whole language of home changes too.

Then there is the phrase “moving on.” I’ve never loved those words. Moving on sounds like leaving them behind, but grief has taught me that we don’t move on from the people we love.

We move forward.

There’s a difference. Moving forward means carrying their love into every chapter that comes next. One lets go; the other holds on in a different way.

One of the words grief changed for me was “husband.” It sounds so simple until someone asks about him. Even now, years later and happily remarried, I still stumble over the words. When I’m talking about Jack, I instinctively want to say, “my husband.” Then I catch myself and add, “my late husband.”

Not because I love my husband now any less. But because Jack didn’t become my ex-husband when he died. That word has never sat right with me. An ex-husband is someone you separated from. Someone you chose to leave, or who chose to leave you. Death isn’t a divorce. Love doesn’t end because a heartbeat does.

Jack will always be my late husband. And Chantz is my husband. Somehow, grief made room for both truths to exist at the same time.

Then there was another tiny word I had to relearn: “We.”

After Jack died, I remember catching myself saying “we” when I meant “I.” “We love that restaurant.” “We’re thinking about taking a trip.” Only there wasn’t a “we” anymore. There was just me. I can’t even describe how lonely that little correction felt. One letter. One word. One life completely changed. It’s amazing how grief can turn the smallest words into the heaviest ones.

The same is true for “closure.” I don’t think love was ever meant to have closure. Love doesn’t close. It changes. It grows quieter. It becomes memories instead of moments, but it never really ends.

Of course, there are also the words people offer with the very best intentions: “At least they aren’t suffering.” “At least you have other children.” “At least you had so many wonderful years.” But I’ve learned that grief rarely needs an at least. It just needs someone willing to sit in the middle of the sentence without trying to finish it for you.

Even “forever” has changed. Before grief, forever felt like a promise stretched out in front of me. Now, forever feels like love stretched across heaven and earth—a love that continues even though life looks different, a love that refuses to end simply because someone is no longer here.

Maybe that’s one of the quietest truths about this journey. Grief doesn’t just change your calendar. It doesn’t just change your address. It changes your language.

You begin speaking in memories. You measure time differently. You hear ordinary words with extraordinary weight.

And every once in a while, someone says something that finally captures what you’ve been feeling all along. Not because it fixes your pain, but because it reminds you that you aren’t the only one learning to speak this new language.

That’s why I keep writing these letters to you. Because every single one is my way of saying: If these words have changed for you too... I understand.

And maybe understanding is one of the most healing languages we will ever learn.

With grace and grit,Angie

If these letters help you feel a little less alone, I'd love for you to stay. New letters and short podcast episodes arrive each week.

If you enjoyed this letter, you may also like:

• The Problem With Grief Is That It Changes Your Address

• The Problem With Grief Is That Nobody Else Can See Your Calendar

One of the strangest things about grief isn’t the sadness. It’s the beauty that comes afterward. That probably sounds like something no grieving person wants to hear—I know I wouldn’t have believed it either.

When my son Garret died, and when my husband Jack died, I couldn’t imagine laughing again. Planning for the future felt impossible. Joy felt like something that belonged entirely to other people.

But then...life kept unfolding. Not because I wanted it to, and not because I was “over it.” Simply because life has a quiet way of continuing, even when your heart wishes it would stop.

Years passed. My daughter grew up. I fell in love again, and I married Chantz. I started Butterflies + Halos, and I wrote a book I never imagined I’d write. I found purpose inside pain I never wanted. If you looked at my life today, you might call it beautiful. And you’d be right. It is.

But here’s the part almost no one talks about: Building a beautiful life after loss can be incredibly lonely. Because the more beautiful your life becomes, the more complicated your grief can feel. You find yourself wishing two completely different lives could somehow exist at the exact same time.

I wish Jack could see what Butterflies + Halos has become.I wish Garret had grown into the young man I still imagine him to be.I wish my old family and my new family could somehow sit around the same dinner table.

I know they can’t. But that doesn’t stop me from wishing.

Sometimes people assume that because you’re smiling, because you’re traveling, because you’re making plans and have found happiness again...that the grief must have faded. It hasn’t. It has simply learned how to coexist with joy. That is very different.

I no longer believe healing means leaving someone behind. I think healing means making room. Room for laughter, and room for tears. Room for old memories, and room for new traditions. Room for gratitude, and room for longing.

I’ve learned that love doesn’t divide; it expands. Loving my life today doesn’t mean I loved my old life any less. Loving Chantz doesn’t mean I stopped loving Jack. Celebrating today doesn’t erase yesterday. Both stories belong to me. Both families belong to me. Both versions of my heart are still here.

If these letters feel like a safe space for your own heart, I’d love to have you walk this journey with us.

Maybe that’s why this journey can feel so lonely. People often expect grief to end, or happiness to replace it. But the truth is much more tender than that.

The happiest moments in my life still have empty chairs. The proudest accomplishments still have people I wish could witness them. The laughter is real—and so are the tears. They’ve simply learned to sit beside one another.

If you’ve ever felt guilty for laughing after loss...If you’ve ever wondered whether moving forward meant leaving someone behind...If you’ve ever looked around at the beautiful life you’ve built and still felt an ache for the one that never got to be...

I hope you know this: You are not doing grief wrong. You are doing something incredibly brave. You’re carrying yesterday while still choosing today.

And maybe...that’s what resilience really looks like. Not forgetting. Not replacing. Not moving on. But building something beautiful with pieces of a heart that still remembers.

With gratitude,

Angie

P.S. If you are finding it hard to sit with these words on a screen today, or if you simply prefer a voice in your ear, I have recorded an audio version of this letter for the Grace & Grit podcast. You can listen to it right here on Substack, or find it on Apple and Spotify.

Whether you read these letters with your morning coffee or listen along on a quiet walk, I am so deeply grateful you are here.

You are never carrying these empty chairs alone.

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Dear friend,

Every year, sometime around July 1st, something inside me changes.

Not dramatically.

Not all at once.

It’s quieter than that.

It feels like the first deep breath after you’ve been holding it for weeks.

If you’ve lived with deep grief, you might know exactly what I mean.

Enjoying this letter?

If these words meet you where you are, I’d love to invite you to join me. Every week I share honest letters about grief, hope, and rebuilding a life after loss.

For me, June has always carried more weight than the other months. It holds my son Garret’s birthday. It holds the anniversary of the day he left this earth. Many years it has also held Father’s Day, a day that carries its own complicated mix of love and loss.

Those dates don’t simply appear on my calendar.

They settle into my body.

And every year, without even realizing it, I begin carrying them long before they arrive.

Life doesn’t stop, of course.

The emails still come.

The laundry still needs folding.

Orders still need to be packed.

People still need pieces of me.

From the outside, everything looks normal.

But inside...

It feels like I’m swimming inside a fishbowl.

I can see life happening all around me, but everything feels muffled.

Heavier.

Slower.

As if I’m trying to walk through water while everyone else is moving on dry land.

It’s one of those things that’s almost impossible to explain unless you’ve lived it yourself.

Then July arrives.

And something loosens.

Not my love.

Never my love.

Not even my grief.

But the grip it has on my nervous system.

I breathe differently.

I sleep a little easier.

Ideas begin to return.

I find myself reaching for my journal again.

My creativity quietly knocks on the door.

And I remember something grief has spent twenty years teaching me.

Grief has seasons.

People often say grief comes in waves.

I think that’s true.

But I’ve come to believe it also arrives in seasons.

There are seasons when we build.

Seasons when we dream.

Seasons when we laugh more than we cry.

And there are seasons when our only job is to carry love.

Quietly.

Faithfully.

Without apologizing for how heavy it feels.

For years, I fought those seasons.

I thought healing meant pushing through.

Creating anyway.

Checking every box.

Staying productive no matter what my heart was carrying.

Now I know better.

This year, I had three greeting cards sitting on my computer.

Finished.

Designed.

Ready to be released.

They waited.

Not because I was lazy.

Not because I wasn’t inspired.

Because I wasn’t ready.

For the first time, I didn’t shame myself for that.

I let them wait.

And somewhere along the way I realized something that surprised me.

Maybe grief wasn’t getting in my way.

Maybe grief was simply asking me to honor the season I was in.

That thought has stayed with me.

Because how often do we assume we’re falling behind...

When maybe we’re simply being invited to rest?

How often do we compare someone else’s springtime to our winter?

How often do we expect ourselves to bloom while we’re still tending roots no one else can see?

The older I get, the less interested I am in forcing growth.

I want the kind that comes honestly.

The kind that has survived storms.

The kind that doesn’t need to prove itself.

Maybe your “July” doesn’t actually happen in July.

Maybe yours comes after the holidays.

Or after a birthday.

Or on an ordinary Tuesday when you suddenly realize you laughed without feeling guilty.

Maybe it’s the first time you make plans for next month.

Or buy flowers.

Or hear their favorite song and smile before you cry.

Whatever your season looks like...

Trust it.

You don’t have to rush into someone else’s summer.

You don’t have to bloom because the calendar says you should.

Healing has never followed a schedule.

It follows the heart.

As for me...

I’m grateful July has arrived.

I’m grateful to feel the fog beginning to lift.

I’m grateful that my hands are creating again.

Not because grief is gone.

But because, somehow, it has made room for hope to sit beside it.

And maybe that’s what this mid-year shift really is.

Not becoming someone different.

Just becoming yourself again.

One quiet breath at a time.

Until next season...

With love and hope,

Angie

Don’t miss the next letter.

This is the beginning of a new series called The Seasons of Grief, where we’ll explore how love, loss, and hope change through every season of life.

If you’d like the next letter delivered straight to your inbox, I’d love to have you join us.

P.S.

I’d love to know...

Does your grief have seasons?

Is there a month that feels heavier than the others? Or one that feels like the first breath after holding it for far too long?

I’d love to meet you in the comments.

Grief doesn’t just break your heart.

It quietly changes your address.

Not the one your mail gets delivered to.

The one your soul lives at.

One day you wake up and realize you’re no longer living in the life you once knew.

Your house may be the same.

Your job hasn’t changed.

Your friends are still in your phone.

Your favorite coffee shop still knows your order.

From the outside, everything looks familiar.

But inside?

You’ve moved.

You now live in a place where dates carry more weight than days.

Where birthdays aren’t just birthdays.

Where ordinary Tuesdays can suddenly become unbearable because twenty years ago on an ordinary Tuesday, your entire world changed.

You live where a song can reroute your entire afternoon.

Where the smell of sunscreen reminds you of summers that never got to happen.

Where a tiny pair of shoes in a store can steal your breath before you’ve even realized why.

You live in a neighborhood where joy and sorrow aren’t enemies.

They’re neighbors.

They wave to each other from across the street every single day.

One moment you’re laughing so hard your stomach hurts.

The next, you’re sitting in your car wiping away tears because you heard that song.

People who haven’t lived here often don’t understand.

Not because they don’t care.

But because they don’t know this address exists.

They assume you’ve moved on because they’ve moved forward.

They wonder why anniversaries still matter.

Why birthdays still sting.

Why certain months seem heavier than others.

They don’t realize that in the world of grief, time isn’t measured the same way anymore.

It’s measured in “before.”

And “after.”

Sometimes they’ll tell you they miss the old you.

The truth is...

So do you.

You miss the version of yourself who believed life made sense.

Who assumed tomorrow was promised.

Who never imagined memorizing the date your world fell apart.

Grief doesn’t just ask you to miss someone.

It asks you to become someone new.

A person who carries both unbearable loss and unbelievable love.

A person who can celebrate and mourn in the very same breath.

A person who learns that healing doesn’t mean leaving someone behind.

It means learning how to carry them differently.

The hardest part of this new address isn’t living here.

It’s wondering if anyone else knows how to find you.

If you've found yourself living at this address too, I'd love to walk alongside you.

Some days it feels like you’re standing on the front porch of a house no one visits.

People wave from a distance.

They send the occasional text.

They mean well.

But they don’t quite know how to walk up the path and sit beside you.

I don’t blame them.

I wouldn’t have known this place existed either.

Not before Garret.

Not before Jack.

Not before grief handed me a new set of keys and quietly whispered, “This is where you’ll live now.”

It’s not where I wanted to be.

But over the years, I’ve discovered something beautiful.

There are neighbors here.

Not the kind who borrow sugar or mow your lawn.

The kind who recognize the look in your eyes before you’ve said a single word.

The grieving mother who quietly reaches for your hand.

The widow who nods because she understands.

The friend who’s walked through loss and doesn’t rush your healing.

The stranger who says, “Me too.”

We find each other.

We don’t need directions.

We already know the way.

And maybe that’s what hope looks like after loss.

Not moving back to the life we once had.

Not pretending this address doesn’t exist.

But slowly making a home here.

Planting flowers in the places we thought nothing could ever grow again.

Leaving the porch light on for the next grieving heart who wanders down this road, wondering if they’re the only one living here.

They’re not.

Neither are you.

Grief changed my address. Love is what keeps making it feel like home.

My sweet Garret,

Twenty years.

I stared at those words this morning, waiting for them to make sense.

They still don’t.

Twenty years ago, I kissed your soft cheeks, held your tiny hands, and whispered goodbye to a little boy who had only been here for one year.

Today, I’ve spent more of my life missing you than I had the privilege of raising you.

That’s a sentence I never imagined I would write.

When you first went to Heaven, people told me time would help.

I know they meant well.

But they didn’t understand that time doesn’t lessen a mother’s love.

It simply gives that love more places to live.

You live in my heart now.

You live in every butterfly that still catches my eye.

You live in every grieving parent I have the honor of sitting beside.

You live in every card I create, every book I write, every conversation I have with someone who believes they can’t survive another day.

You have no idea how many people know your name.

Or maybe you do.

Maybe Heaven lets you peek.

I hope so.

I hope you know that your one beautiful year has changed thousands of lives.

You were my first lesson in unconditional love.

You became my greatest lesson in resilience.

Not because losing you made me stronger.

I still don’t like when people say that.

Losing you broke me.

But God met me there.

Piece by piece, He taught me that broken things can still become beautiful.

Not because the cracks disappear.

Because His light has a way of finding them.

Sometimes I wonder what you’d be doing now.

Would you be taller than me?

Would you have inherited your daddy’s laugh?

Would you still let me hug you, or would you pull away with that embarrassed smile teenage boys have?

Would you roll your eyes when I took too many pictures?

Those questions used to make me cry.

Sometimes they still do.

But today...

Today they make me smile, too.

Because wondering about you means you’ve never stopped being part of my life.

People often ask if I still grieve after twenty years.

The answer is yes.

Not because I’m trapped in the past.

Because I love you in the present.

There is a difference.

I’ve laughed these last twenty years.

I’ve fallen in love again.

I’ve watched your sister grow into an incredible young woman.

I’ve built a business because of you.

I’ve become an author.

A grief educator.

A woman I don’t think I could have imagined twenty years ago.

None of those things happened instead of loving you.

They happened because loving you changed me forever.

If there’s one thing you’ve taught me, it’s this:

Love doesn’t end because life changes.

It simply changes how it shows up.

And every June, it finds me all over again.

Do you know something I’ve never told you?

For years, I hated June.

I hated watching everyone celebrate sunshine while I counted another year without you.

But somewhere along the way, June became something else.

It’s still the month I lost you.

It’s also the month Butterflies + Halos was born.

The month I published my first book.

The month I celebrate dreams I once thought had died with you.

I think that’s one of God’s sweetest miracles.

He didn’t erase my sorrow.

He planted hope beside it.

Both still bloom every June.

And somehow...

they don’t compete.

That’s what twenty years has taught me.

Grief and joy are not enemies.

They are companions.

They walk beside each other.

Just like you’ve walked beside me all these years.

I miss you, sweetheart.

I always will.

But I no longer measure my life by what I lost.

I measure it by the love you’ve continued to give me.

Thank you for making me your mom.

It has been the greatest honor of my life.

Forever one.

Forever loved.

Love,

Mom

To the parents reading this...

If today is your own angelversary, whether it’s one year or twenty, I hope you know this:

You don’t have to stop loving them to keep living.

You don’t have to choose between remembering them and embracing the life still in front of you.

Carry them.

Talk about them.

Laugh because of them.

Cry because of them.

Build because of them.

Love because of them.

Our children don’t ask us to stop living.

If anything, I believe they quietly cheer us on.

Twenty years later, I still carry my little boy.

And somehow...

he’s still carrying me, too.

With love,

Angie

Dear Friend,

One of the most frustrating things about grief is that nobody else can see your calendar.

Not your actual calendar.

Your grief calendar.

The one you carry around in your head.

The one filled with birthdays, death dates, diagnoses, anniversaries, hospital visits, phone calls, and moments that changed your life forever.

Everyone else is busy planning vacations.

You’re wondering if you can survive next Thursday.

If you've ever felt like you're carrying a calendar nobody else can see, you're in good company here. Subscribe for honest conversations about grief, resilience, and finding your way forward.

Everyone else sees June.

You see that June.

Everyone else sees Father’s Day.

You see a son who should be here.

Everyone else sees a random Tuesday.

You remember exactly what happened on that Tuesday twenty years ago.

The strange thing is, nobody means any harm.

Most people aren’t forgetting.

They simply aren’t carrying the same calendar.

If I can be honest, sometimes we secretly want them to.

We want someone else to walk into the room and say:

“I know what day it is.”

Not because we need a parade.

Not because we need the world to stop spinning.

Just because it feels exhausting being the keeper of the memories.

The historian.

The one responsible for remembering.

The one carrying dates that nobody else writes down anymore.

I think that’s one of the loneliest parts of long-term grief.

Not the missing.

The remembering.

Because twenty years later, people assume you’ve adjusted.

And in many ways, you have.

You laugh.

You travel.

You build a life.

You create new memories.

You even experience joy again.

But underneath all of that, there’s still a calendar running quietly in the background.

Always.

Every grieving person I know has one.

The date nobody else remembers.

The milestone nobody else sees coming.

The week that suddenly feels heavier for reasons they can’t explain.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

Most people aren’t forgetting our loved ones.

They’re simply living in a story that kept moving.

While we became the guardians of a chapter they never had to memorize.

That realization has softened me.

Not completely.

I’m still human.

I still occasionally want to shake people by the shoulders and yell, “HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW WHAT DAY THIS IS?”

But I’ve learned something important.

Their forgetting is usually not a measure of their love.

It’s a measure of their distance from the loss.

Those are not the same thing.

So when those invisible dates show up, I’ve stopped waiting for other people to acknowledge them.

I acknowledge them.

I light the candle.

I tell the story.

I say the name.

I buy the cupcake.

I visit the grave.

I take the walk.

I do whatever helps me honor the life that mattered.

Because grief has taught me something surprising:

The responsibility of remembering isn’t a burden.

It’s a privilege.

A heartbreaking privilege, yes.

But a privilege nonetheless.

And while nobody else can see my calendar...

I can.

And that’s enough.

Most days, anyway.

The other days, I reserve the right to roll my eyes dramatically and eat dessert first.

Grace and grit, friends.

Both are required.

If this letter resonated with you, I'd love for you to join me here at Grace & Grit Letters. Every week, I share honest reflections on grief, resilience, faith, second chances, and the messy beauty of rebuilding a life after loss.

As Garret’s 21st birthday approaches, I’ve found myself wrestling with something I don’t know how to explain to the people around me.

Not because they don’t care. Most of them do.

Not because they aren’t supportive. They are.

But because there are some experiences in life that can only be understood by the people who lived them beside you.

Twenty-one.

Twenty years gone.

Those numbers have been sitting heavily on my heart lately.

For most people, June is simply another month on the calendar. Summer plans are being made. Father’s Day is approaching. People are scheduling barbecues, vacations, and weekends at the lake. Life continues to move forward exactly as it should.

And yet, every year when June arrives, I find myself standing in two worlds at once.

There is the life I have now—the one I have worked hard to build after unimaginable loss. The life filled with new memories, new traditions, new relationships, and people who love me deeply.

Then there is the life that existed before.

The life where Garret was here.

The life where Jack was here.

The life where our future looked entirely different than the one that unfolded.

The older I get, the more I realize that one of the hardest parts of grief isn’t just missing the person who died.

It’s missing the people who remember them the way you do.

Lately, I’ve been missing Jack in a way that feels different than usual.

Not because I wish my current life were different.

Not because I haven’t found happiness again.

But because Jack was the only other person who knew exactly what these milestones meant.

He was Garret’s dad.

He was the only person who knew what it felt like to hold our son, dream about his future, and imagine the man he would become.

When Garret died, we carried that grief together.

We wondered together.

We remembered together.

We asked all the impossible questions together.

Would he have played sports?

Would he have gone to college?

Would he have been tall like his dad?

What would his laugh sound like today?

Now those questions belong mostly to me.

Graci was so young when Garret died. She knows his story. She loves her brother. She understands his importance in our family.

But she doesn’t carry the memories.

She couldn’t.

She was simply too little.

And so, as the years pass, I sometimes find myself feeling like the keeper of something precious that fewer and fewer people can truly see.

I carry memories that exist nowhere else.

I carry stories that only a handful of people remember.

I carry a version of our family that disappeared long ago.

There is a loneliness in that.

A quiet loneliness that has nothing to do with being surrounded by people.

I am surrounded by wonderful people.

The loneliness comes from knowing that nobody else feels June the way I do.

Nobody else’s heart begins counting the days to Garret’s birthday.

Nobody else automatically notices that this would have been his 20th year.

Nobody else feels the significance of twenty years gone and twenty-one years imagined.

And how could they?

Their lives kept moving.

Mine did too.

At least on the outside.

But grief has a strange relationship with time.

For those who have never experienced profound loss, time often feels linear. One year becomes five. Five becomes ten. Ten becomes twenty.

For those of us whose worlds stopped in an instant, time feels different.

Part of you moves forward.

Part of you stays behind.

Part of you learns how to laugh again.

Part of you remains forever connected to the moment everything changed.

Twenty years later, I can tell you that grief softens.

It changes shape.

It becomes more familiar.

But it never completely leaves.

Especially during milestone years.

Especially when your child should be turning twenty-one.

Especially when the person who would have understood your heartbreak isn’t here either.

What I find myself struggling with this year is figuring out how to honor Garret while also honoring the life I’ve built.

I don’t think people talk enough about this part.

The balancing act of loving the people who are gone while fully loving the people who are here.

The tension between remembering and living.

The challenge of wanting space for reflection when everyone else simply sees another date on the calendar.

Father’s Day falls on Garret’s birthday this year.

People want to celebrate.

People want to gather.

People want to make plans.

And I find myself wondering how to explain that I may not want to participate.

Or that I might participate differently.

That I might attend part of an event but not stay for the celebration afterward.

That I might need quiet instead of company.

Reflection instead of distraction.

Not because I’m sad.

Not because I’m ungrateful.

But because some days deserve space.

Some dates deserve to be felt.

Some memories deserve more than squeezing them into the margins of an already busy day.

The truth is, I am still figuring this out.

I am still learning how to integrate the mother I was, the wife I was, and the woman I am today.

I am still learning how to honor Garret’s life without feeling guilty for living mine.

I am still learning that I don’t need permission to step away, reflect, remember, or grieve.

Maybe that’s what this season is teaching me.

That I don’t have to choose between my past and my present.

I can love them both.

I can celebrate the life I’ve built while still honoring the life I lost.

I can show up when it feels right and step back when it doesn’t.

And perhaps most importantly, I can stop trying to explain the significance of these dates to people who have never lived them.

Because the people who understand won’t need an explanation.

And the people who don’t aren’t failing me.

They’re simply fortunate enough to have never watched their world stop turning.

Twenty years later, mine is moving again.

But some days, especially in June, I still feel the place where it broke.

And maybe that isn’t something to fix.

Maybe it’s simply another way of loving someone who should still be here.