Carrying the Loss Forward

The grief is still here. It’s going to be here for a long time.

And the season is also still here. The schedule continues. The games are on the calendar. And at some point — not because it stops hurting but because that’s what seasons do — you’re going to have to figure out how to carry the loss and the competition at the same time.

This devotional is for that moment.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

Mourn with those who mourn. The mourning is not over because the schedule resumed. And the team that pretends the grief is done — that suits up and plays as if nothing happened, performing the return to normal — is not actually carrying the loss well. It’s burying it. And buried grief surfaces at unpredictable times in ways that are harder to manage than the acknowledged grief.

What does it look like to carry the loss forward? It looks like naming the person before the competition. It looks like the ritual that honors them without requiring everyone to perform emotion they don’t feel right now. It looks like the understanding within the team that different people grieve differently and at different paces, and that all of those paces are appropriate.

It looks like the permission to compete fully without guilt. Playing your best is not a betrayal of the person who is gone. In most cases, the person who is gone would want exactly that. The competition can be a way of honoring them without requiring that it carry the full weight of the grief.

Carry the loss. Don’t bury it. Compete through it with permission. Honor them in the way that is most genuine to who they were.

Let the team shape the honoring ritual. What comes from them is more genuine than what is imposed on them.