This morning started full of intentions. After a full night’s sleep, I felt rested and upbeat. The kind of rested that feels rare. The kind that makes you believe in possibility again.
A whole day stretched out before me like clean canvas – quiet, unhurried, entirely my own. Paint. Write. Read. Maybe fit in a load or two of laundry. Little things, but meaningful. Pieces of a day that might have felt whole.
I got up and got ready to meet two friends for breakfast – an old coworker and my manager. Familiar faces. Easy conversation.
Stuffed peanut butter French toast. A warm cup of coffee. Laughter. The comfort of people I’m familiar with.
Sunday was off to a good start. By the time I got home around 11 a.m., I felt light, maybe even hopeful. Like maybe this would be one of the soft Sundays.
And then – quietly, inexplicably – everything shifted.
It’s like grief and memory sometimes wait until you’re standing still. Until your guard is down, the coffee’s settled, and the toast has been digested. They don’t always arrive with fanfare.
Sometimes they just . . . slip in. Quiet as breath. Heavy as fog.
I had a beautiful, warm morning. And then – without warning – the air changed.
Sitting on my bed, I felt a heaviness settle over me. Not like sadness exactly. More like inertia. Like something unseen had layered itself over my shoulders and made movement feel pointless.
The light in the room looked the same, but I didn’t feel the same in it. It was as though a curtain had been pulled between me and the day I’d planned.
Nothing loud. Nothing dramatic. Just a soft detachment. Like I was watching the hours move from the other side of the glass.
I glanced at the book on my dresser – Van Gogh: The Life – his story calling out in color and ache. But I couldn’t bring myself to open it. I couldn’t carry his sorrow today alongside my own.
I dipped a brush in paint, hoping muscle memory might override the fog. But nothing came out the way I wanted. The colors felt wrong. The strokes were clumsy. The image in my mind never made it to the page.
Still, I pushed through—because it felt like I should accomplish something. I wanted the act of finishing to save me. To prove I hadn’t wasted the day. But the finished piece wasn’t what I’d hoped for. It wasn’t what I needed.
And that’s when the familiar voice crept in—the one that says, Why bother? The one that dresses itself in logic but reeks of loss. The one that pretends to be practical, but is really just grief in disguise.
Because here’s the truth I keep learning. Grief doesn’t need permission. It doesn’t need a trigger or a tidy narrative arc. It doesn’t even need a reason.
Sometimes it’s just Sunday. And sometimes Sunday is enough.
Maybe it’s the echo of all the Sundays that came before. Those restless childhood days when Becca felt a sadness she couldn’t name. She’d act out, and I, not yet knowing how to read the language of her heart, mistook it for misbehavior.
It wasn’t until she was older that I understood: She was never trying to be difficult. She was just feeling too much. She was just being human on a day that always seemed to ache.
And maybe it’s the Sundays I carry from my own memory. The ones when the boys were little. Sundays when I didn’t have to work, when we could stay in our pajamas too long, when the house was filled with their laughter and bickering and cartoons and pancakes and the soundtrack of a life I loved.
Sundays meant all three of them were with me. No school. No rush. No obligations. Just the soft kind of togetherness that mothers memorize without even meaning to.
But even then, Sunday evenings brought their own kind of grief. Because I knew Monday was coming. They’d go back to school. The world would take them again. And I would miss the way the house felt when we were all inside it, breathing the same air.
So maybe the sadness doesn’t just come from loss. Maybe it also comes from love. From having had something beautiful and knowing what it felt like to hold it. From remembering the sacredness of the ordinary.
And maybe it’s that Sunday too—the one that began just after 2 a.m., with a phone call. A shattering. A dividing line between the life I had and the life I live now.
Even when I don’t consciously think about it, my body remembers. My spirit remembers. And sometimes the weight of remembering outweighs the joy of intention.
That doesn’t mean the morning was a lie. It means that joy and sorrow can live side by side. That a day can begin in light and still gather shadow by nightfall.
And maybe that’s okay.
Maybe all that’s asked of me today is to name it. To say: It shifted. To acknowledge that I did what I could. To forgive the rest.
And to let that be enough.
Words Can Express 