🌿 A Gentle Way to Enter a New Year After Loss

Be Gentle with yourself going into a New Year with out your partner

The beginning of a new year can feel complicated when you’ve lived through loss. While the world celebrates fresh starts and resolutions, your heart may still be carrying memories, longing, and quiet ache.

For a long time, January felt heavy to me. It felt like a reminder that time was moving forward even though part of me wanted to stay where love once lived so fully. I learned that it’s okay to enter a new year slowly — without expectations, without pressure, and without forcing hope before it’s ready.

This year, I’m choosing gentle beginnings.
Not resolutions — but intentions.
Not goals — but grace.

Healing doesn’t ask us to forget. It asks us to breathe, to soften, and to allow ourselves to live again while still honoring what we’ve lost. Some days that looks like progress. Other days it looks like rest. Both are enough.

If you’re reading this and feeling uncertain about the year ahead, know this: you don’t have to have it figured out. You don’t need a plan. You only need to take today as it comes.

Let this year unfold quietly. Let joy arrive without guilt. Let grief come and go without judgment. There is room for all of it here.

As we step into this new year together, my hope is that this space continues to feel safe — a place where healing is allowed to be slow, honest, and deeply personal.

One breath.
One moment.
One gentle step at a time.

🕯️ New Year’s Eve — Memories That Last

For the last 20 years, New Year’s Eve was always a special night with Michael. From quiet dinners at home to laughing with friends and the Lynch Family.

Michael would always be playing somewhere for NYE it was always adventure were we would go, I was always so happy I get to spend those evenings with him.

Over the last 7 years, as I write these words, I still feel a little lost. The traditions remain, the calendar turns, but the person who made these nights whole is no longer here. Some nights, that absence feels like a weight pressing on my chest. Some nights, it feels like a hollow echo where laughter used to live.

I have learned, slowly, that it’s okay to carry both — the joy of the memories, and the ache of their absence. I don’t have to force happiness. I don’t have to hide the longing. Grief is not a problem to fix; it’s a presence to hold.

As the New Year begins, I light a candle for Michael, I breathe in the memories, and I allow myself to feel both love and loss. I honor the years we shared, and I honor the space in my heart that still misses him.

New Year’s Eve is not just about celebrations. It’s about reflection, love, and the quiet moments that stay with us forever