Carrying Joy and Loss on the Same Day

Today, our community celebrates the first day of school. My oldest daughter heads into third grade, and the street is alive with the sound of young children starting kindergarten. It’s the kind of day that marks time in a family’s life.

Boys walking into school for the first time.

But in our house, it is also a day of absence. Our son Jack should be walking into his first classroom today. Instead, only his memory goes. He enters those kindergarten rooms stitched into the shark patches, dangling from backpack key chains bearing his name, and in the quiet hearts of would-be classmates.

These gestures touch me deeply. They remind me that people remember. They also remind me that he’s not here, which is its own kind of ache.

It’s not easy to sit with both truths: joy for the present, grief for the missing. As a leader, a father, and a husband, I want to be strong for my family, especially my wife. I also have my own grief to carry. The Stoics teach that we do not control the events of our lives, only our response. Today, my response is to remember, to allow myself to feel, and to hope.

To hope that one day I will see Jack again. To hope that my daughters feel the fullness of life’s joy even when shadowed by loss. And to hope that I can lead myself, and those around me, with honesty in moments like this.

Sometimes leadership is simply allowing space to carry both joy and loss on the same day; to let them exist side by side.