When I was small, my mother taught me that grief and joy can co-exist in the same season, the same day, the same moment. 

This is a terribly blurry picture of my mother, throwing a snowball at my dad behind the camera with happy mischief. (I ran it through Prisma due to the blurriness.) 

My sister and I were toddlers at the time, wandering around behind him. Actually, I’m sure the shot is blurry, because my dad was trying to dodge.

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this here, but my mother lost her dad a couple weeks after her eighteenth birthday—he had a heart attack on Christmas Eve when she was in the room. So, the holidays—around the same time as this picture was taken—have been hard for her for as long as I can remember. 

So, my mother taught me that you can have joy and grief at the same time, because I watched her let herself be joyful, even when she was also sad. 

Because Mom demonstrated this for me, I try to demonstrate here:

You can grow big enough to hold both together. You might think that the joy and grief would cancel each other out, but instead, what you feel is completely and utterly alive.

Originally posted via Instagram on 3/25/21, the same week that my mother and I met up in San Antonio, Texas, to visit her mother in hospice for the last time.