After My Wife's Death, My Daughter Helped Us Find A New Way To Grieve

I remember the moment my daughter, Grace, gave our family the phrase that changed how we live with grief.

It was the second anniversary of her mother Mia’s death. Two years earlier, our lives had been split into a before and an after by a sudden, unimaginable event. One day, my wife was alive. The next, she was gone.

Overnight, I became a single parent to three children, and our home became a place where shock, sorrow and logistics lived side by side.

The first year was a blur. We existed in a kind of survival mode, driven by a raw instinct to keep going, keep functioning, keep everyone fed, clothed and upright. There was no space for reflection. Only endurance.

The second year was different. The numbness wore off, and in its place came something more complicated. Life was continuing. And alongside that realisation came guilt. Guilt for laughing. Guilt for having moments of lightness. Guilt, even, for discovering that it was possible to feel okay for stretches of time.

As the anniversary approached, we began talking about how to mark it. The traditional approach, a day of quiet, solemn remembrance, felt heavy, almost suffocating. We wanted to honour Mia, but the idea of an entire day devoted only to sadness felt like too much for the children, and, if I’m honest, for me too.

Grace, who was 12, listened to us talking and then said, carefully, “Dad, what if we did something different? Maybe it could be happy-sad instead of just sad?”

The phrase landed with the quiet authority only children seem capable of. In those simple words, she cut through a very adult lie. That grief must be a single, fixed emotion. That remembrance must only ever look one way. That joy, somehow, is a betrayal.

So we tried it her way.

We went to a windswept beach that Mia had loved. We packed a picnic. We flew bright, ridiculous octopus kites and paddled in the freezing English Channel, shrieking with laughter as the cold water numbed our feet.

At some point, we even sang a slightly off-key “Happy Birthday” into the wind and the waves. There were tears too. But they sat alongside the laughter, not in opposition to it.

Later that day, as the sun was dropping and the light was thinning, Grace asked me a question I think many children who grow up with loss carry quietly inside them.

“Dad, is it okay that sometimes I forget to be sad? Like, I’m just playing with my friends and I don’t think about Mum at all for a little while. And then I feel bad.”

I told her the truest thing I knew. That her mum wanted her to have a happy life more than anything. That being happy does not mean forgetting. It means living. And that is never a betrayal.

Since then, the “Happy Sad Day” has become our family’s annual ritual. Not a forced performance of positivity, and not a day of pure mourning either, but something that makes room for both.

It has taught us something essential. That grief and joy are not opposites. They can exist in the same space, in the same hour, sometimes even in the same moment.

It has also helped us understand that healing is not linear. The guilt Grace described, the fear of forgetting, the sense that sorrow is a duty, is a common trap.

The “Happy Sad Day” gives us a place to put our grief on purpose, which, paradoxically, makes it easier to live fully the rest of the year without carrying that weight everywhere we go.

The world you return to after a crisis is not the world you left. There is no real going back. You do not bounce back. You move forward and you carry what you have lost with you. You learn to build a larger, more complicated story that includes both love and absence.

Our day is a reminder that we are different now, but also that different does not only mean diminished.

The most profound lessons often come from the smallest voices. My daughter did not fix our grief. But she gave us a way to live with it. Honestly, tenderly, and without pretending that love only ever comes in one emotional colour.

Stuart Green is author of the new book The Regenerate Leap, out now. You can learn more at www.regenerateleap.com.