Joshua — A Light That Continues
Today I celebrate my son Joshua —
33 years of his spirit, his presence, his place in my life.
This day no longer lives in grief for me — it lives in love, in remembrance, and in the quiet knowing that he has always been part of my world.
“He was never only a moment in my life;
he became part of the way
I walk through this one.”March 21st has always felt like such a perfect day for him.
It falls at the time of the Spring Equinox — or just beside it, depending on the year —
the moment when light and dark come into balance, and the earth begins to open again to new life.
I have always seen something deeply beautiful in that.
In 1993, I was living in my first home away from my parents, and for the first time I witnessed daffodils pushing up through the ground in my own yard. I had never watched them grow before. This was a new experience for me, and it began right after Joshua’s birth.
There was no sadness in it.
Only life moving forward.
And from then on, those first daffodils of spring became a symbol to me — not of sorrow, but of life continuing, returning, and beginning again.
“Life does not ask us to forget — it asks us to see differently.”In traditional Greenlandic Inuit belief, the northern lights were not simply light in the sky.
They were understood as living presence.
In parts of Greenland, it was said that the aurora were the spirits of children who died at or before birth — including those who never took a breath in this world.
They were not seen as lost or gone, but as moving, playing, existing in another realm just beyond the visible.
Some stories speak of them as children at play — their spirits dancing, laughter carried across the sky in movement. There were also quiet cautions not to call out or whistle to them, a reminder that what exists beyond our sight is still in relationship with us, still aware, still near.
Other Inuit traditions speak of the lights as spirits in motion — sometimes ancestors, sometimes souls.
These were not poetic ideas created for comfort.
They were ways of understanding the world as alive, connected, and continuous.
“What we cannot see has never meant it is gone.”When I first came across this belief, I did not feel like I was learning something new.
I felt like I was recognizing something I had already known.
From the very beginning, Joshua was never absent to me.
When my second son was three years old, he overheard his grandparents speaking about his brother. They did not realize he was listening, and they did not realize how much he would understand. But after that, he began asking for him.
So I taught him to look for the brightest star in the night sky and say hello, because that was his brother looking down on him.
Since then, for all these years, I too have done just that.
I have looked out into the night sky to say hello to my boy.
Sometimes in complete stillness, sometimes in the quiet of a full day finally ending.
It has become a sacred moment for me — that quiet time of night, when the world grows still and I lift my eyes upward, remembering that love is never truly gone. It simply changes form, and continues with us.
It was never something I taught only for him — it became something I came to live by.
“Love learns new ways to stay.”For 17 years, I made memorial dolls for families who had lost their babies.
Each one created slowly, intentionally, with deep care for the life it represented.
That work was never about grief alone.
It was about acknowledgment — and offering something to hold when the world had gone quiet around them, when their child’s name was no longer spoken.
A way of saying:
Your child was here.
Your love is real.
This life is part of your story.
Joshua was present in all of it.
In every family I held space for.
In every piece I created.
In every moment someone felt seen instead of silenced.
That work came to completion in its own time — as it was meant to.
And still — Joshua has never left my life.
He has a place in my home.
A place in my voice.
A place in the way I move through the world.
I speak his name.
Not from sorrow —
but from continuity.
There is something I have come to understand that I wish more people were told:
Remembering does not have to mean reliving grief.
It does not mean staying in the past.
To remember is to bring someone forward with you.
To include them in your life as it continues.
To let their existence shape you without being defined by loss.
Love does not require suffering to remain real.
It can become steady.
It can become quiet.
It can become something that lives alongside you without pain.
And still be just as true.
This is not something I learned in theory — it is how I live, and it is what I teach.
“Healing is not leaving something behind —
it is learning how to carry it differently.”I have never believed in avoiding emotion.
I have also learned not to become stuck inside of it.
There is a way of feeling deeply — truly allowing what is present to move through you —
and also understanding that moving forward is not forgetting.
It is integration.
It is allowing what has been lived to become part of you,
instead of something that holds you in place.
And in that, there is great change.
There is strength.
There is a different kind of peace.
In many ways, this path began with him — he was my first teacher in understanding what love truly is.
And this year, it feels especially meaningful that I am opening the doors to my first shamanic course on his birthday.
It feels like a beautiful way to honor him, and all he has taught me.
A quiet full-circle moment I could never have planned, but one that feels deeply right.
So today, I celebrate Joshua.
Not as something that happened long ago —
but as someone who is still part of my life.
And when I look at the night sky, and the lights that move across it,
I do not see something distant.
I see a world that has always been more alive than we are taught to believe.
For those who carry a child in this way —
"Moving forward does not separate us from them — it brings them with us."There is no single right way to remember.
But know this:
You are not holding onto the past.
You are carrying love forward.
And there is something deeply beautiful in that.
Something that does not fade.
Something that continues.
Happy Birthday my Sweet Boy!
With all my love,
