Over the past year or so, I’ve written quite a bit about hope, fatherhood, letting go without giving up, and learning to go where the love is. Looking back, I realize those posts have all been helping me work through the same question, even if I didn’t fully recognize it at the time. How do you continue holding onto your love for a child who has been alienated from you for years while convincing yourself you shouldn’t also feel the sadness that comes with it?
For a long time, I believed healing meant the sadness would eventually fade. If I stayed grateful, kept moving forward, and focused on the many blessings in my life, perhaps one day it would simply stop visiting. Today, I believe I was asking the wrong question. Maybe the problem isn’t that we continue to carry sadness. Maybe the problem is that we’ve convinced ourselves we’re somehow failing if we still do.
We live in a world that celebrates moving on. We encourage people to find closure, let go, and put the past behind them. While there’s wisdom in not allowing ourselves to become consumed by grief or loss, I sometimes wonder if we’ve also created the expectation that healing means sadness should eventually disappear. I’m no longer convinced that’s true. This isn’t a post suggesting that sadness is something we should seek, cling to, or allow to define us. It’s simply acknowledging that sadness can be an honest companion to love, especially when that love no longer has a place to land.
I’ve worked hard to build a life filled with purpose, meaningful work, wonderful friendships, incredible family, and experiences that continue to bring me joy. I’m genuinely happy with the life I’ve built, which is exactly why I’ve stopped believing that occasional sadness somehow means I’m stuck. Instead, I’ve come to see it as part of the price, and the privilege, of continuing to love. If you choose to keep loving, you don’t get to choose to avoid the sadness that sometimes comes with it. For years, I wished I could somehow preserve the love while leaving the sadness behind. I’ve come to believe those two things are connected in ways we often refuse to acknowledge, and I’m no longer sure we should be trying so hard to separate them.
Some time ago, I wrote that sometimes sadness needs somewhere else to go. I still believe that. What I’ve learned since then is that giving sadness somewhere to go doesn’t mean trying to make it disappear. It means acknowledging it, understanding why it’s there, and finding a healthy place for it to exist. Each of us has to discover what that looks like in our own lives, but I’ve found there’s a world of difference between making room for sadness and allowing it to quietly take over. Making room for sadness isn’t surrendering to it. It’s accepting that if we insist on protecting the love, we may also have to accept the sadness that faithfully follows. I don’t see that as weakness anymore… I see it as honesty.
For me, that love is for my daughters. It didn’t disappear because circumstances changed, because years passed, or because it hasn’t been returned. That love is still mine to carry, just as the memories are mine to cherish and the gratitude for having been their dad is mine to hold. No one gets to decide whether I continue loving them, because love is one of the few things that truly belongs to us.
The more I’ve thought about it, though, the more I’ve come to believe this isn’t just my story. It’s something many of us wrestle with, whether we’ve lost a relationship, a parent, a spouse, a sibling, a close friend, or a child. When love continues but circumstances change, sadness isn’t necessarily a sign that we’ve failed to heal… sometimes it’s simply evidence that what we loved still matters.
Perhaps we’ve been asking ourselves the wrong question. Instead of asking how to get rid of the sadness, maybe we should ask what we’d have to give up in order to eliminate it. If the answer is the love itself, I’m not sure that’s a trade worth making. Maybe the goal isn’t to judge ourselves because sadness still visits from time to time. Maybe the goal is to make room for it without allowing it to crowd out gratitude, joy, hope, purpose, and all the love that still surrounds us. We don’t have to choose between honoring what we’ve lost and embracing what we still have. Our hearts are capable of holding both.
That’s where I’ve finally arrived. If choosing to protect the love also means making room for some sadness, then so be it…
because in the end, I’d rather carry both than lose either.