When I first started writing, I thought I was writing about grief.
I thought I was writing because I needed somewhere to put the pain.
Somewhere to pour out all the thoughts that keep me awake at night.
The guilt.
The sadness.
The loneliness.
The overwhelming reality of raising two girls without their dad.
And while all of those things are still true, something unexpected has happened over the last few days.
The story is changing.
For months, every time I sat down to write, I found myself returning to the same place.
The day everything changed.
The day I lost my husband.
The day my girls lost their father.
The day our lives split into a “before” and an “after.”
But recently, I started asking myself a different question.
What if I stopped writing about how Noel died and started writing about how he lived?
What if, instead of reliving the worst day of our lives, I started remembering all the ordinary days that came before it?
The truth is, I don’t want Noel to become a tragedy.
I don’t want his life to be reduced to one moment.
One decision.
One terrible day.
Because that wasn’t who he was.
Noel was funny.
He was stubborn.
He was frustrating.
He was loving.
He was fiercely protective of his family.
He was the dad who woke up early with the girls on weekends.
The husband who made breakfast in bed.
The man who would tell me I was beautiful even when I looked like I had just rolled out of bed.
He was the teenager hiding behind stock boxes at Hi-Fi Corporation because he was too shy to tell a young girl working at reception that he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
For years, I thought I was the one with the secret crush.
It turns out we were both carrying the same secret.
And that memory made me smile.
A real smile.
One that wasn’t forced.
One that didn’t come from pretending to be okay.
One that came from remembering him.
Not losing him.
Remembering him.
For the first time in months, writing didn’t just make me cry.
It made me laugh.
It made me remember.
It made me spend time with the man I loved instead of the pain he left behind.
Don’t get me wrong.
The grief is still here.
I miss him every single day.
I still reach for my phone when something happens and I want to tell him about it.
I still look at my girls and wonder how we are supposed to do this without him.
I still have days where the weight of it all feels unbearable.
But maybe there is room for both.
Maybe I can miss him and remember him.
Maybe I can grieve him and celebrate him.
Maybe I can cry over the future we lost while still smiling about the life we had.
So today, my writing journey feels different.
I am still writing through grief.
But I am also writing through love.
And perhaps that is what this next chapter of healing looks like.
Not forgetting.
Not moving on.
Just remembering more than the ending.
Because Noel was so much more than the way he died.
And I want the world to know the man he was.
The husband.
The father.
The friend.
The gentleman.
The love of my life.
And maybe, just maybe, telling those stories will help me find pieces of him again.
One memory at a time.
🤍
