05/11/2026
As Mother’s Day has passed and Father’s Day approaches, I’ve been thinking a lot about the complicated relationship grief often has with holidays.
Some people made it through Mother’s Day better than they expected.
Others discovered the ache was deeper than they realized.
And now, quietly, many are already bracing themselves for Father’s Day.
Grief has a way of attaching itself to calendars, traditions, smells, songs, meals, and greeting card aisles.
Sometimes we grieve the father or mother who died.
Sometimes we grieve the child who died.
Sometimes we grieve the parent we never truly knew, the relationship that remained strained, or the version of a parent we longed for but never fully had.
For years, I hated Father’s Day.
I remember standing in stores reading cards that all felt false to me because none of them reflected my lived experience. They spoke of closeness, emotional safety, wisdom, and connection in ways that felt foreign to my relationship with my own father.
I would sit in church services honoring “godly fathers” and quietly wonder what it must feel like to be loved in that way by a man who truly understood you.
It took me many years to stop comparing my father to an idealized version of fatherhood and begin seeing him as a human being shaped by his own story, limitations, wounds, generation, and understanding of love.
I remember my husband once telling me:
“You are walking east. Your father is walking west. The two of you may never see eye to eye on what is best for you, but that doesn’t change the fact he loves you and wants what he believes is best.”
That perspective did not erase grief.
But it softened something inside me.
And I think many people carry similar grief into these holidays:
the grief of death,
the grief of estrangement,
the grief of unmet expectations,
the grief of longing,
the grief of what never was.
One of the hardest realities about grief is that life keeps surrounding us with reminders.
The songs.
The meals.
The traditions.
The empty chair.
The social media posts.
The celebrations that highlight what feels absent in our own lives.
So how do we move through it?
I don’t think healing comes from pretending the grief is gone.
I think healing comes as grief slowly stops being something we are fighting against and instead becomes part of the larger story we are learning to carry.
Not the whole story.
But part of it.
Over time, many people begin to discover that grief is not only about who we lost, but also about how loss reshapes identity, relationships, expectations, faith, and the way we move through the world.
And somehow, life continues to hold both realities at once:
joy and ache,
gratitude and longing,
love and disappointment,
presence and absence.
If these holidays are difficult for you, you are not alone.
There is no “correct” way to move through days that carry both memory and pain.
Sometimes surviving the day is enough.
Sometimes breathing again is enough.
And sometimes healing begins not when the grief disappears, but when we stop demanding that our story look different than it does.
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