A Year in Absence, A Decade on the Horizon
This week, I crossed a threshold—one year since my husband’s sudden departure, and the brink of a new decade in my life. I woke up cocooned in blankets, nursing a head cold and an ache in my heart that filled every corner of the house.
Grief, I’ve discovered, is not just the sound of sobbing at midnight. Sometimes, it settles in like a fog you can’t reason with—a muted emptiness that defies even the kindest gestures. When the person who read my silence, who met my needs before I voiced them, is gone, the world feels off-axis. Jay was my shelter in life’s downpours, his quiet love a living room lamp, always aglow, steady against the dark. I depended on him( he was my provider and protector. I miss most the gentle, everyday acts of care: the way he’d fill my gas tank, wash my car or take care of the laundry. All of them, now missing from the ordinary.
Yesterday, as I sat alone, I realized my previous birthday had passed in the same hush—in mourning, longing for what the calendar couldn’t restore. On my thirty-ninth, I begged God for one more glimpse of Jay, just one sacred, borrowed moment. I received it—a birthday etched in the memory of my soul. Since then, small hints remind me of a narrative greater than my own: the stamp of my birthdate on the back of Jay’s birth certificate, a gentle reassurance that our lives were intertwined by a Hand far wiser than my understanding.
Yet through all of this, I am reminded to stay humble and alert to the mystery of how God gives and takes away. Like Job, I must whisper, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Loss deepens gratitude for what was given, even as it sharpens the ache for what has been taken. This paradox—blessing and loss woven together—is my current companion.
Now, at forty, I am as companioned by loneliness as I am by gratitude. I wonder about the next act: Can I learn to love again, not out of need, but from wholehearted freedom? I want love to find me in new forms—in raising my children, in showing up for others, in delighting in possibilities yet unknown. I want thanks and hope to settle gently beside sorrow at my table.
Perhaps that is the invitation for us all:
Where, right now, do you need to honor both grief and gratitude?
Can you find, even in your shadowed places, the fingerprints of a faithful God—evidence that you are never forgotten, even as He allows both giving and taking in your story?
I have few answers. Grief is not a straight line, and healing moves at the speed of mercy. But I know this: even in the silent places, I am not utterly alone. God is here. Jay’s memory is here. And I am still here—present, breathing, praying, willing to step forward one small day at a time, trusting the Giver, whatever He allows.
What do you need to release as you turn to your own next chapter?
Where does stillness serve you, and where is it time for brave, new motion?
Allow your story, however uncertain, to be held in the spaciousness of both sorrow and hope—remembering always, with humility, that the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, and yet we bless His name.
Let The Day Begin 