If you follow me on any of my other platforms you know that my father passed away on May 23. Once again, life has served up a full plate of sadness, disbelief, grief, and anger…anyone who’s lost someone they love deeply knows what I’m talking about.

Loss changes you. Everything, every interaction is now viewed through the lens of it. The world keeps spinning and all you want to do is press pause. How can I be expected to be me when my heart has two giant parent-shaped holes in it? Daddy’s girl suddenly without him.

I have a loving husband, great kids, and an amazing group of friends, but something about being a parentless child makes the ground beneath me feel unsteady. Typically, I would spend the day with him on Wednesdays because I don’t have my grandson that day. There hasn’t been a Wednesday since he’s been gone that I haven’t found myself getting ready to visit only to realize that he’s gone making the pain of the loss fresh again.

My dad liked to say, “Life is for the living”, a phrase that confused me as a kid. Now, I understand it. That understanding comes tinged with sadness because what it really means is that you have to let go. You cannot stay blanketed in grief making your life a shrine to that pain. We only get this one life, and my dad would want me to live it.

Here I am Daddy, trying to figure all of this out without you.

Joseph R. Garr June 5, 1930- May 23, 2023

“Say not in grief ‘he is no more’ but in thankfulness that he was.”

– Hebrew Proverb