The Joy in Grief

09/01/2026

Beautiful Soul,

I went to New Mexico by myself to find out if I could still feel my son.

I sat right underneath the light in the Chapel in Santa Fe. A dancer opened his wings while performing in the plaza. Another one was doing a healing circle dance. A Comanche medicine man named Eschiti handed me a drum he made with his own hands. Then the hearts started showing up. A Sacred Heart carved into the chapel door at Chimayo. One in the gravel at a lookout on the road to Taos.

Somewhere in there I stopped calling it a coincidence.

Faith is not certainty. It is attention. It is deciding to see what is already being handed to you.

Nine years ago I lost him. He is not gone. I just had to learn how to witness him.

Who came to mind while you watched this? Comment her name below and I will send this to you so you can pass it on.

Walking with you, The Joy Doula. ❤️

08/30/2026

08/20/2026

Beautiful Soul,

For about a year after I lost him I could not sit still. Five minutes. I could not do it.

Not for meditation. Not for a meal. Not for a conversation that ran longer than a couple of minutes.

And everybody kept telling me to rest.

What they did not understand is that stillness was the most dangerous place I could go. The second I stopped moving, it caught up with me. So I stayed loud, I stayed busy, I filled every silence I could find and I called that coping.

If that is where you are right now, hear me. You are not avoiding your grief. You are surviving it. There is a difference and it matters.

Stillness comes later, and it comes in seconds long before it ever comes in minutes.

This week I will show you how I got there.

Send this to someone who cannot stop moving. ❤️

Walking beside you,
Rachel

08/20/2026

Beautiful Soul,

I talk to my son out loud in the car, and I am not apologizing for it.
Out loud. At volume. Usually out on the highway where nobody can see me.

For a long time I did it quietly, because I was scared of what it made me. Unwell. Stuck. One of those mothers who never came back.

Then I noticed I always drove home calmer than I left. Every time.

Your nervous system does not know the difference between a conversation and a one sided one. It only knows you said the thing instead of swallowing it. Grief that gets spoken moves. Grief that gets held goes into your jaw, your shoulders, your sleep.

So talk to them. In the car, in the shower, in the kitchen at two in the morning.
You are not unwell. You are doing something your body has been begging you to do.

Send this to a mother who has been holding it all in. ❤️

Walking beside you,
Rachel

08/19/2026

Beautiful Soul,

You do not need a religion to pray. You need a sentence.

This one belongs to you whether you sit in a pew, a mosque, a temple, your car, or nowhere at all.

Once tonight, say one true sentence out loud, to whatever you understand to be listening.

It does not have to be pretty. Mine have been I cannot do this, and where are you, and one word I will not type here.

Out loud, though. Not in your head. Out loud makes it real and gives your body something to do with it.

That is prayer. Everything else is decoration.

Try it tonight and tell me how it landed. And send this to someone who thinks she is doing it wrong. ❤️

Walking beside you,
Rachel

08/19/2026

Beautiful Soul,

I stopped praying for about a year, and I never told a soul.

It was not a decision. I did not sit down and renounce anything. I opened my mouth one night out of habit and realized I did not have one thing to say that was not furious.

So I stopped. And I carried a quiet shame about it right on top of everything else I was already carrying.

Here is what I know now that I did not know then. That year was not a failure of faith. That year was faith. Being that angry at something means you believe it is there to be angry at.

What brought it back was not a sermon and it was not a book. It was one sentence, said out loud in my car, and it was not a nice sentence.

It still counted.

Send this to someone who thinks she has lost her faith. ❤️
Walking beside you,
Rachel

08/14/2026

Beautiful Soul,

If you are angry today, be angry today.

You are not behind and you are not doing this wrong. There is no version of this where you were supposed to have made peace with it by now.

Rest. ❤️

Walking beside you,
Rachel

08/14/2026

Beautiful Soul,

My bereavement therapist said one thing to me that I have carried for nine years.
She said you can be angry. You can be upset. You can cry, you can be sad.

Just do not stay there.

That is the whole thing. That is the difference between grieving and drowning, and it is not about how much you feel. Feel all of it. It is about not moving in.

Here is what I found on the other side of it, and it took work. Real work. Breath work, releasing, getting the stuck things out.

The relationship did not end. It changed shape. I am still his mother. I still know what would have made him laugh. That is not memory. Memory is past tense. That is happening in me right now.

People will tell you to let go. You do not have to let go of anything. You only have to let it become something you carry instead of something that carries you.

Be angry. Be heartbroken. Be all of it. Just do not stay there. ❤️

Walking beside you,
Rachel

08/11/2026

Beautiful Soul,

Grief has aisles, and you do not get to pick which one you are standing in.

That is how I have described it from the beginning, because that is exactly what it felt like.

There was the aisle of angry. The aisle of frustration. The aisle of disbelief. The aisle of heartbreak. And I would bebop from one aisle to the other. Some days all four before lunch.

For the longest time I thought that meant something was wrong with me. That I was doing grief badly. That I was supposed to be making progress in a straight line.

No. That is just the store.

So here is today's practice. Name your aisle. Out loud, in your head, in a note on your phone. It does not matter. Just say which one you are standing in right now.

Not to fix it. Only to know where you are. You cannot find your way anywhere if you will not admit where you are standing.

Which aisle are you in today? Tell me below, and send this to a mother who thinks she is doing this wrong. ❤️

Walking beside you,
Rachel

08/04/2026

Beautiful Soul,

I was angry at God for a long time.

I prayed every single night. Protect my kids, protect me. That was the prayer. And then my son is not here.

So you tell me how that works. Because I asked. I asked every night, I did everything I was supposed to do, and he is still gone.

I was furious. And then I was ashamed of being furious, which is its own kind of exhausting.

Then I started bereavement therapy and my therapist handed me a psalm to read. Psalm 88. Go find it if you want to.

That psalm is angry. At God. And it does not wrap up nicely at the end. It sits in the dark and stops.

And she looked at me and said it is okay to be angry. You are allowed to be angry with God.

I did not know that. Nobody had ever told me that.

So if you are somewhere in that right now and you cannot say it out loud to anyone in your life, hear me say it. You are allowed.

Send this to a mother holding a fury she thinks she is not permitted to have. ❤️

Walking beside you,
Rachel