God spoke to me through a good friend the other day. I had been agonizing over what to do with the upcoming 2nd annversary of Nicholas' death. We spent last year's 1st anniversary quietly together, also not knowing what to do then.
What complicated it this year is that we are also planning a family trip with other family friends scheduled to start that day and into the weekend. Would we be disrespectful or irreverent or selfish by having fun together on a day that represents something so hard?
As I was trying to sort through my uncertainty about it all, she broke through with straightforward honesty and set me free. If you wanted to celebrate a person, wouldn't you choose something like their birthday? Why would you want to focus on the day they died? There's a difference to giving space to the energy that comes with the hard things that we went through when we had to say goodbye, and to trying to do right by making a monument out of the day.
I realized I was trying to do the "right thing" and by putting myself under that pressure was not giving myself the freedom to process the feelings around that day in whatever way was best. It is not wrong or selfish to spend time as a family together. Celebrating our family in the face of remembering our hard times is what makes us stronger.
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