Joy in the Dark Journal

It has officially been nine months since my father passed away.

While I would like to say I have been happy or sad the whole time is entirely untrue. There are some nights I cry silently to myself in my locked bedroom, where I can inconvenience no one with the sadness that overtakes my soul. There are nights where I am glad that he is no longer alive because I don’t have to wake up in the middle of the night to my father in pain and scrambling to figure out what I can do to help the man who has done everything in his power to make sure I grow up into an amazing woman.

I heard a saying that was “grief is just love with nowhere to go”. That sentence is utterly heartbreaking but not fully true. While my father may not physically be here I can still show my love for him in other ways. At the age of 7, my father bought us a family dog, Andy. My dad carefully looked at animal shelters and even found the perfect dog fairly quickly. I remember being out to dinner and finding out that the dog was mainly black with hints of white in him. Me being a naive child and not understanding the complexity of just changing a dog’s name, I was adamant on naming him Oreo. Thankfully, my family did not listen to me.

Andy was rescued from the streets. The shelter believes he was abandoned by his previous owners. We brought him home on April 2, 2011. Which originally made me think this was a horrible April Fool’s joke on my dad’s part. Thank goodness it wasn’t because we loved that dog until his death in February 2024.

The whole point of bringing this up is that one day I was missing my dad a little extra I bought things for that exact animal shelter we got Andy from and donated it. Just last week, I bought flowers for a coworker because I needed to pour love into this world. While your person may not be on this Earth, you can still do things to honor the life that they lived.

It is utterly important that we show love one another. I challenge you, yes you reading this silly little post, to remember someone you have lost and do something in their memory. Think about something they loved or were so passionate about and go. It can be as simple as buying coffee for the person behind you or as complex as volunteering in your community. When we stop talking about our loved ones is the moment they truly die.

While it might seem silly, if you do not have someone to talk to about your person please feel free to comment on this post and tell me about them. ❤