This is a hard day …
Today is Janet’s birthday.
It feels strange to mark it without her, the calendar still knows the date even if the world feels altered by her absence. No phone call, no present no jokes anout getting older. She died 5 months ago and while time has moved on in the way it always does, the wound of losing her is still a little raw. Not constantly painful, but tender. Easily brushed. Easily felt.
Grief doesn’t shout every day. Sometimes it sits quietly beside you, like a hand resting where another hand used to be. Today it’s there gentle, insistent, full of memories.
What carries me, though, is love. The real kind. The kind that doesn’t end when someone’s life does. The shared jokes, the history that only siblings know, the threads she wove through her family and friends simply by being herself. That love didn’t leave with her, it stayed behind and settled into us.
So today isn’t only about loss. It’s about continuity.
Janet is carried forward in the people who loved her, in the stories that still make us smile, in the ways we show up for one another because she mattered. That love will carry me, her family, and her friends into 2026 not untouched by grief, but strengthened by what we were lucky enough to share.
Happy birthday, Janet.
You are missed.
You are loved.