Grief, Growth, and Transformation: A Year in Reflection
This morning during my quiet time I was journaling about the many changes that will be happening for me and my family in 2025.
The word Transform/Transformation came up over and over and I realized that this is my word for 2025.
2024 has been one of the hardest years of my life. I lost two incredibly important family members within months of each other, and also watched as my mom was diagnosed with cancer, and her journey with beating it.
This all happened within the first 5 months of 2024.
Just when I thought things were going to settle down from all of this, in June, we were given some news that rocked our world.
Not to mention, 2 hurricanes here in Florida, where so many of our friends and family lost their homes, and one of those hurricanes made it’s way to Asheville, NC where my daughter was for college. We couldn’t get a hold of her for over 48 hours, and my momma’s heart was terrified until I finally heard her voice and that she was safe.
To say I am ready to bid 2024 farewell would be an understatement.
However, even though this year has been difficult, I am able to find the beauty in all of it. It took me a while to find it, but I can tell you I finally did.
Two things can be true at once: Things can be extremely difficult in life, AND there can be beauty and joy in the midst of it.
The beauty of this year has been found in time with my friends and family. The support and love I have received through it all. Realizing further, that stuff really doesn’t matter, people do.
That grief is a gift, if you allow yourself to sit in it, and that being brave enough to say “I’m not okay, and that’s okay,” has been one of the most transformative ways I have lived this year, and I am grateful for it.
Within grief, there are so many beautiful gifts. I know that may be difficult to hear, but it’s true. When we allow ourselves to properly grieve instead of trying to “overcome” it or “stuff it down,” grief becomes a place of rest and restoration. It becomes a place where we can find parts of ourselves that have been dormant and long buried, and a place where we can slow down enough to connect with ourselves in ways we never have before.
I’m knee deep in Mary Reynolds Thompson’s Book: The Way of the Wild Soul Woman and she writes, “Unattended, grief can appear as endless as a desert with no water in sight. If it cannot be witnessed or shared, it spreads into every crack and gully, taking hold as depression, numbness, rage, or as a dust-dry ache that permeates every part of your being. Fatigue drags you down and makes action almost impossible. But grief expressed is like water in the desert, ushering life.”
And I realized this is why I do what I do. Holding space for post abortive women to grieve properly is incredibly important work. For many of us, we’re not given the opportunity to do so. And so our grief goes unattended, permeating every area of our lives, weighing us down, and taking hold of our life force.
You deserve to have water in your desert, where life can bloom. Where YOUR life can bloom.
As we get closer to closing the chapter that has been 2024, I want to ask you what you want to transform in 2025, for this new chapter that has yet to be written?
You are the author of your story.
You decide what this chapter gets to be. Even if it throws difficult things at you, you still get to determine how you respond to them.
I want to encourage you today, and over the next week, to sit quietly and think about this past year.
What are the lessons you have learned?
What do you need to release to make room for what’s to come in 2025? What do you want to transform?
With love and gratitude,
Jennifer