🌻 Mourning
Mourning is the price we pay for deep love.
It’s raw. It’s honest. And it changes by the hour.
In the early days, mourning is loud and public.
You speak about your loss constantly —
to friends, to strangers, to yourself.
You cry freely. You share photos. You tell stories.
You need others to witness your pain because it feels too big to carry alone.
It feels almost like you’re keeping them alive through words.
If you stop talking about them, maybe the world will forget — and that feels unbearable.
So you talk. You repeat stories. You search for people who knew them just so you can say their name out loud again.
But over time, something shifts.
The grief doesn’t disappear —
but it becomes quieter.
It stops shouting and starts whispering.
It becomes internal.
Where once you’d burst into tears in the middle of a conversation,
now you just pause. Inhale. Swallow hard. And move on.
Where once you needed to speak of them every day,
now you think of them in silence —
in the car,
in the shower,
in that long stretch of the afternoon when the house feels too still.
It’s not that you’ve “accepted” anything —
it’s that your body and mind have learned to carry the weight without dropping it all over the place.
The grief is still there —
but it lives deeper inside you now.
And people start to say,
“It gets better with time.”
What they mean — if they’re being honest —
is that your mourning becomes less visible.
Less obvious.
Less disruptive.
Not because it’s gone —
but because you’ve learned how to carry it without letting it spill into every corner of your day.
You still miss them.
You still ache.
But the grief has been absorbed into your bones.
You stop announcing your sadness to the world.
You learn to acknowledge it privately.
To nod at it.
To give it a moment — but not your whole day.
That is the slow, painful, necessary process of mourning.
You never stop missing.
But you slowly learn how to keep living.
I remember with Angé, the first month after she passed, I couldn’t make it through an hour without saying her name.
Sometimes I said it aloud. Sometimes just in my head.
Her name became my anchor, and my wound, all at once.
I wanted everyone to know she had been here.
I wanted the world to feel her absence as sharply as I did.
But months later, I found I could go a whole day without telling someone about her —
not because I loved her any less,
but because she had become so deeply woven into me that she no longer needed constant explanation.
She was there in my gestures, my choices, my silence.
She didn’t need me to say her name every five minutes.
She had already shaped the man I am.
⸻
🌻 Contentment
Eventually, if you allow the mourning to pass through you —
rather than build a house inside it —
you reach something quieter.
Contentment.
It doesn’t arrive with a banner.
It doesn’t announce itself.
There’s no exact day when you “feel better.”
But slowly, over weeks and months, you realize:
• You’ve stopped crying every day.
• You’ve built small rituals that anchor you — a morning walk, a cup of tea, a journal.
• You’re less reactive. The tears don’t sit just behind your eyes all the time.
• You’ve let some people back in — maybe not deeply, but enough.
• You can have a conversation without bringing their name into it. Not because you’ve forgotten, but because it no longer feels urgent.
And most importantly —
you’ve started to cope.
You’ve created systems.
Built scaffolding.
Put cushions around your day.
You’ve stopped fighting the fact that they are gone —
and started figuring out how to live in their absence.
That’s contentment.
But contentment, though precious, can also be deceptive.
Because it feels so much safer than grief,
we start to treat it like a destination.
We stop pushing.
We stop risking.
We stop reaching for joy — because we’ve finally found stillness.
But stillness is not the same as living.
And that’s where the danger lies.
I remember the first time I felt “okay” after Angé died.
It was a sunny morning. I’d made coffee, sat on the stoep, listened to birdsong, and for half an hour, I didn’t cry.
It felt like a victory — and it was.
But I also felt a strange guilt, as if I were betraying her by enjoying something.
It took me a long time to understand that moments of stillness are not betrayal — but they are also not the final goal.
They are resting places, not endpoints.
⸻
🌻 Contentment Can Be a Trap
Contentment can become your hiding place.
It’s the place where you’ve managed to avoid breakdowns —
so you dare not disturb the peace.
You avoid laughter because it might open up grief again.
You avoid new friendships because you don’t want to explain your story.
You avoid risk because you’re afraid of another loss.
You nod politely to life.
You do the expected things.
You survive.
But you don’t glow.
You don’t giggle.
You don’t gasp at beauty.
You don’t get excited.
And over time, you stop noticing you’re not really living anymore.
That’s the trap of contentment.
It keeps you safe — but it can also keep you small.
It’s not bad. It’s not wrong.
It’s just not enough.
With Angé gone, I could have stayed there forever — just keeping the garden going, meeting friends for coffee, maintaining a life that looked fine on the outside but was hollow on the inside.
I could have built a perfectly “content” life, safe from the risk of further loss.
But she didn’t live her life that way, and I knew she wouldn’t want me to either.
⸻
🌻 Happiness
So I choose something else.
I choose happiness.
Not because I’ve “moved on.”
Not because I’ve forgotten.
Not because the pain is gone.
I choose happiness because I still remember.
Because I still ache.
And because I still believe in beauty — even after death.
Happiness isn’t the reward for surviving grief.
It’s the rebellion against staying in it too long.
It’s the brave, daily decision to live.
To reach.
To dance.
To try.
To fall in love again — with people, with nature, with purpose.
This kind of happiness doesn’t mean you stop mourning.
It just means you stop waiting for mourning to end before you allow yourself to feel joy.
Happiness can exist inside mourning.
It can flicker in moments of contentment.
And the more you pursue it — deliberately, consciously — the more space it begins to take.
One of the most healing (and terrifying) choices I made after losing Angé was to start walking the Camino.
Not to “get over” her.
Not to distract myself.
But to see if joy could live alongside grief in my heart.
And it did.
Some days, it was the smallest thing — a sunflower in a field, a stranger’s kindness — but it was enough to remind me that happiness hadn’t left the earth when she did.
⸻
🌻 The Joy–Happiness Coexistence
There will be days when a wave of mourning knocks you flat.
Let it.
There will be afternoons when contentment feels like all you can manage.
Settle into it.
But in between those moments —
look for the light.
• Go for a walk and smile at the sun.
• Play a song that makes you sing.
• Eat something delicious and don’t rush it.
• Plant something.
• Volunteer.
• Travel.
• Tell a joke. Even a bad one.
• Invite someone new in.
Choose to participate.
Choose to engage.
To create.
To laugh.
To make plans.
To say yes again.
That’s happiness.
Not the absence of grief —
but the presence of life
🌻 Reflective Questions
1. Where are you right now — mourning, contentment, or beginning to pursue happiness?
2. Are you letting contentment become a comfort zone that’s keeping you from joy?
3. What small acts of happiness could you choose today — even within your grief?
4. What routines or rituals have helped you cope — and what new ones could you add to grow?
5. If you were to live “Because of” the person you’ve lost, what choices would you make differently starting today?
Because of Angé
Because of Angé, I know how much love matters.
How much touch matters.
How much living while you’re alive matters.
She never postponed joy.
If there was a walk to take, she took it.
If there was a dance to dance, she danced.
If there was something beautiful to notice, she noticed it — and made sure you saw it too.
So I won’t sit in a shadow version of life.
I will mourn her.
I will find contentment.
But I will also reach for happiness.
Because of Angé, I will:
• Keep walking
• Keep noticing
• Keep planting
• Keep smiling
• Keep creating
• Keep being
I will take risks.
I will laugh loudly.
I will cry openly.
I will let people in.
I will keep loving — even with the risk of loss.
Because that’s how she lived.
And that’s how I want to live too.
