Hope + Grief

This week, my uncle had a massive aneurysm.
Twenty-four hours later, his life support was turned off.

I am full of sadness for my dear cousin, an only child—who has now lost both parents in under two years.
It’s almost too much for one heart to carry.
And yet… carry is exactly what we do.

Our hearts, somehow, carry on.

Hope doesn’t mean there’s no death.
No loss.
No aching emptiness where someone—or something—once lived.

Real hope knows grief. Intimately.
It’s not the shiny cheerfulness of denial,
or the distant optimism of “better days.”
It’s what remains after the unthinkable.
What rises, slow and quiet, from the rubble.

Grief changes you.
It carves you out. Conditions you.
Washes through like a tide that doesn’t ask permission.
It stains the soul with salt and memory.
It strips away what doesn’t matter—
and sometimes, what does.

And yet, even there, hope lives.
Not in opposition. In companionship.

Grief transforms.
Hope animates the transformed.
Grief lays you bare.
Hope whispers, “you can walk forward from here.”

They are both sacred forces.
Grief reminds us we were touched, moved, marked.
Hope says, “and still—your heart beats.”

Hope doesn’t rescue us from grief.
It steadies us.
It keeps our feet on the ground
after grief has swept through and changed the landscape.

Grief hollows us—until we can hold more.
It softens us—until we can feel more.
It remakes us—until we are no longer who we were…
…but somehow, even more ourselves.

This is not the end.
This is a becoming;
Tender. Weathered. True. Deepened.

So when grief visits you, dear one -
Know that it has not come to break you.
You are being marinated in meaning.
Steeped in significance.

Hope assures, “It is better to have loved and lost...”

And when you’re ready—
Hope will walk with you.
Not to escape the pain,
but to honour what it left behind.

Peering ahead into the challenges of this life, I understand:
Grief will become a more frequent visitor.
The times ahead will include more loss.

And so, I seek to get familiar with it—
Familia - I understand I must welcome it to my family.
Make room for it.
To let it teach me how to love better, deeper, truer.
And to show me how to heal.

Mustering courage,
x Megan