Day 1 - 2026...

Today would have been my dad’s 23rd sober birthday.  So weird that he is not here to celebrate it with us.  I am grateful he died sober, but today is just going to feel like a loss, no matter what I do or say.  Kinda feel like he should have been able to claim it, but in recovery, we do not claim one more day than we actually have.  So sorry Dad, you got 22.

I feel so adrift right now.  There has been so much that has happened in the last week:  my dad died on Christmas after being on a rapid decline for 12 days, a tree fell on my house later Christmas night and then Tuesday one of my mom’s dear friends died rather suddenly - I mean we knew she was going to die but the actual dying happened so quickly.  So much death and destruction in one week.  It is a lot to take in.

Grief is this weird thing, I feel fine one minute, and then without warning, I am a wreck.  Then I pull it back together and go on.  I went out last night for New Year’s Eve. Mostly because I love getting dressed up and it was a recovery thing.  I almost didn’t go because I knew that everyone knew that my dad had just died and I, for a couple of minutes, was worried about what you all might say about my failure to grieve appropriately.  I didn’t want the judgment,  “Wow, less than a week after her dad dies and look at her - out on the town having fun!”  Then I decided you do not get to decide what my grief process looks like.  I can’t stop you from judging it but this is my life and my loss and I can do with it whatever moves me in the moment.

Last night it felt like going to hear my friends Sascha and Jimmy speak while wearing a sparkly pretty dress and then dancing for a couple of hours was a good use of time.  It was.  For a few hours I was not thinking about death and loss and all the other shit that swirls through my head.

It feels weird to have moved into a year that will never know my dad.  A year where he will not have taken one single breath.  That my father died last year.  It is kind of trippy for it to be a different year but only a week ago...

I went over to a friend’s house after the recovery event and we just sat around talking.  It was nice, cozy and intimate.  The subject of New Year’s Resolutions came up...and I said, “I don’t set them, I just try my best to do better than I did the year prior.”  The funny thing is that I feel like I am constantly leveling up no matter what I do.  If I am on this path, then I have to do the spiritual work that is in front of me.  And this year it appears I am going to develop a more intimate relationship with loss and death.  Not something I would have picked, but here we are.

2025 wasn’t a bad year, well, except politically.  That was a fucking shitshow that is still ongoing.  But my relationship to 2025 was ok.  I got to do some bucket list items, I got to grow and stretch in directions that have stymied in years past.  All in all, it was a decent year.  I am grateful for the growth and change, even with the pain that was attendant.

I guess, on this first day of 2026, I can see there are some big changes coming my way.  I am going to learn how to move forward in life without my dad.  And there are some other changes that are on the horizon that make me a little frightened and apprehensive.  But, my mantra for 2026 is going to be, “move forward with intent and purpose, manifest the reality you want to be a part of in your life and the lives of others.”  I guess I really feel that this year, the way I hold things, the way I carry that which occurs in my life, is the thing that will make all the difference.

I am learning, ever so slowly, that how I hold things and I how I carry them is super important to my satisfaction with my life.  Sometimes things just get heavy and I need to rest or set them down a bit.  Then I can return to laboring with them.  Other times I think I can accurately assess that whatever it is that has become too heavy or complicated or exhausting is just something I can set down and move forward without.  And then there are other things that will be better weight distributed after some time...I have to find patience with the burden of the load in this moment, knowing that whatever it is I am laboring under will lessen with time because what I am carrying will decrease, erode with the passage of time.  Like tiny particles are shed with each passing moment, a wearing away that happens slowly over the rest of my life.

Some things never truly leave us:  love and grief being the things that endure.  It is impossible, at least in my experience, to make a decision that is effective to stop loving someone you love or stop grieving someone you miss.  Love and grief have their own trajectory in this life and we are not really in charge of any of it.  It is ours to carry and trust that both will become additions and subtractions to our lives, throughout our lives.  Like some sort of emotional calculus...that I do not understand or really want to understand.  I just know that the things that happen to us, the big things the loves and the losses, they are the things that endure, that etch out a different trajectory and path for our lives and our internal landscape...forever.  And our task, I think, is to find a way to carry it so that it doesn’t do us in during the process.

So what I am holding today is that we all get this one life.  And it is ours and the biggest waste of it is to live according to someone else’s rules or ideas or insistence.  Living out of fear of judgment, indiscretion, malice, or misunderstanding.  I reject that life today.  I want to live this life, according to my principles and guided by the realm that I feel acutely each day but have limited access to it in real time.  I want to use this life to wake up and to assist others who are also so inclined.  I want to grow into this lovely human spirit I have been bestowed and give honor to the life, all of this precious, human life I have been gifted.  Today, as 2026 dawns, I want my life to be of benefit to others in all the ways, all the time.  And for all the stuff I get wrong or screw up along the way, may one of us learn something from my mistakes so that we may all become more kind and loving to all.

Namasté to all no exceptions, no carve outs, no limitations.

Again, still...

Happy New Year to All!