I did not know joy as a child.
I knew wonder. I knew the particular stillness of sitting beneath an apple tree, hidden among its branches, watching the last light of afternoon settle over the woods. I knew the warmth of baby goats pressed against me in the barn, the small sounds they made, the astonishing tenderness of their existence.
I knew something sacred lived in those moments, although I had no language for it then.
But joy was something else.
My children brought me joy. Immense joy. Yet even that was weighted by fear. I loved them with a fierceness that was accompanied by an almost constant awareness of how much there was to lose.
And then I lost my daughter.
I want to be very clear about something. Becca’s death did not liberate me. It did not happen so that I might become stronger, wiser, or more capable of appreciating life. There was no hidden gift waiting inside that terrible loss.
What happened afterward was something entirely different.
I began the work of healing.
At first, that work was about learning how to survive the absence of my daughter. How to wake each morning in a world that continued turning without her. How to remain a mother to my sons when so much of me wanted to disappear into the place where she had gone.
I thought I was doing the work of grieving my daughter. I didn’t understand that somewhere within that work, other wounds were being tended. Wounds I had carried since childhood. I wasn’t deliberately reaching back into those years, searching for what needed healing. I was simply trying to find a way to live in the world without Becca.
Only much later did I recognize what had happened.
There is an old saying that when you pull one pearl, the entire necklace moves.
I had been watching the pearl in my hand. I hadn’t noticed the movement of the others.
The frightened little girl who had sought refuge beneath an apple tree had been changing, too. The woman who had carried her fears into motherhood, who had loved so fiercely while remaining so afraid, was changing alongside her.
Not all at once. Not in ways I could have measured or even named at the time.
But slowly, something within me was becoming less burdened.
It has taken me a long time to recognize what that work has made possible.
I experience joy now in ways I never did before. Not because my life is free of sorrow. It never will be. Not because I have found answers to all the questions that once frightened me.
But because fear no longer occupies quite so much of the space within me.
I can stand before a turbulent lake and feel exhilaration. I can be moved to tears by a bee, by music, by the extraordinary tenderness of an ordinary moment. I can paint for the pleasure of making something, without demanding perfection from my hands.
The sacredness I recognized as a child was always there.
What has changed is my capacity to receive it.
I would give anything to have my daughter alive. Anything.
But I cannot change what happened to her.
What I could change, slowly and imperfectly, was how I lived in the years that followed.
And perhaps that is what I most want to say about healing.
It does not make the terrible thing worthwhile.
It makes a fuller life possible in spite of it.
Healing is not a destination. It is a way of living.
I will be healing until the day I die.
And I no longer need to be finished healing to live joyfully.
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