Standing at the Edge of the Year
The last few days of 2025 have felt different than the last few days of 2024 did. As the noise of the busy holidays has started to fade, I noticed that the Christmas and winter decorations that I love so much have started to feel a bit stale (I usually like to keep them up until January 2nd). I have also noticed the tug of grief becoming more persistent as the quiet settles into my soul in these final hours of December. I have to say that I find this a bit ironic because I am sitting at the airport on New Year’s Eve, waiting to board a flight. But somehow, despite the hustle and bustle of the airport lounge, these final few hours do feel quieter. What I am feeling feels a bit heavier than celebration, yet softer than sorrow. It feels as if this tug of grief is inviting me to reflect more, knowing that I still feel a bit reluctant to dive too deeply into the past twelve months. Grief knows I have to be willing to sit down and have a conversation with it in order to enter into 2026 a little less burdened and with a clearer vision. So it tugs. Even in this airport, it wants my attention.
As 2025 comes to a close, I find myself standing at its edge, hand in hand with grief, not with a long list of accomplishments or resolutions (though truly, I have both), but with a full heart and tired bones. This year asked things of me that I did not volunteer for, nor did I want. It required patience when I wanted clarity, endurance when I longed for rest, peace when chaos and confusion surrounded me, and honesty when it would have been easier to keep pretending. Some seasons demanded strength. Others required surrender. Both were costly in their own way.
This year also involved movement. A lot of it. It wasn’t always the kind of movement that changed my physical location. Grief required me to move and shift my perspective on many different aspects of my life, including the goals I had set in late December of 2024. There is something about airports, scenic highways, hotel rooms, and long drives where the landscape shifts while the heart desperately tries to catch up. In 2025, travel became less about escaping or arriving at a destination and more about what happens in between.
Just a couple of weeks following my husband’s death, Thanksgiving of 2023, I traveled to suppress the intense waves of grief and shock. Looking back, travel gave me the space to breathe and to find a bit of joy in what was now a marked holiday season. I refused to allow death to take ownership of Christmas. The quiet moments staring out airplane windows and the anonymity of being in places that were not my hometown allowed grief to loosen its grip just enough for me to move through that first Christmas without him. The relief of being on an airplane, in a hotel room, or in a rental car felt like an escape. Traveling in 2024, that first full year following his death, felt the same. Travel was like applying pressure to a wound, slowing the bleeding of intense emotion.
In 2025, travel began to shift my journey through grief. Grief no longer tolerated being “left at home” or taking a backseat. There were more and more moments when grief showed up as an unwanted travel partner. I didn’t really want to hike trails, swim oceans, or sit on a lounge chair with grief insisting on coming alongside me. I wanted to outrun the feelings it was beckoning me to sit with, even if it was only asking for a brief moment of my time. Traveling to Europe wasn’t far enough to outrun it. Diving in the turquoise waters of a faraway island wasn’t deep enough to escape it. State after state, country after country, work trip after work trip, it kept showing up. This year, grief required me to stay in place and confront it whenever and wherever it decided to appear. Sadness, tears, and loneliness could not be replaced by beautiful and breathtaking locations or even travel partners. Language barriers in different countries did not give pause to grief because, really, grief knows no language. I had to face it.
Through my travels in 2025, I learned that not all moments of healing announce themselves with milestones or victories. Sometimes healing and growth come simply from surviving waves of despair, even when those waves hit while sitting on a white sandy beach. Sometimes it looked like packing a bag and trusting myself enough to go, even when I was unsure of what I would feel when I arrived. I also didn’t know if grief would awkwardly show up with its bags packed full of memories and moments I thought had been buried with my husband. The feeling was disconcerting, to say the least.
The lessons of 2025 did not arrive loudly. They came quietly, slipping in during long drives, sleepless nights, and ordinary moments that did not seem significant at the time. I learned that grief does not move on a schedule and that healing does not follow straight lines. I learned that my faith, which I depend on so deeply, can be both sturdy and fragile at the same time. As I often say, two things can be true at once. I also learned that rest is not wasted time and that stillness can be a form of trust in the grieving process, one that does not have to be scary.
As I prepare to step into a new year, there are things I am choosing to leave behind on purpose. Unrealistic expectations. Timelines that were never mine to begin with. The pressure I have placed on myself to be “over it,” “past it,” or “back to normal.” I am also leaving behind the idea that travel should either fix me or distract me from my grief. Instead, I am learning to let it simply accompany me, mile by mile. I have allowed grief to become my invited travel mate.
There are also things I will carry forward into the new year. While sometimes proving difficult, I will show myself more compassion. I will work on finding the courage to be more vulnerable. I want to bring a sense of gentleness and softness into an industry that often rewards toughness and grit. I am carrying the understanding that movement, whether a walk around the block or a plane ride across the globe, can be healing, not because it erases pain, but because it reminds me that I am still alive, still capable of wonder, and still willing to step into the unknown.
If you are reading this in the final days of the year or at the beginning of a new one, perhaps you, too, have logged some miles, literal or emotional. Perhaps you have stayed close to home and traveled inward instead. Either way, you do not need to summarize your year neatly or make sense of everything you lived through. You do not need a polished reflection or a hopeful ending. It is enough to be honest about where you are standing right now.
There is something sacred about the space I stand in, between what was and what will be. The in-between places have taught me that grief often meets us not at the final destination, but somewhere along the road. As 2025 closes, may we allow ourselves to pause here for a moment. To breathe. To release. To step forward not with certainty, but with grace for our uninvited friend, grief, and grace for ourselves.
