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Finding joy in grief is not a betrayal

Neal Tricarico · · 9 min read

After losing his son Anthony, Neal Tricarico learned that feeling joy again is not a betrayal. Agony and joy can coexist, and grief research backs up what he found in his own heart: love and loss are the same thread.

A ridge under low golden-to-lavender light, on Finding joy in grief is not a betrayal - The Endurant Way

Yes, you are allowed to feel joy again, and no, it does not mean you betrayed them. Grief and joy are not two states fighting over the same room in your chest. They can occupy the same day, the same hour, the same breath, and letting one back in does not push the other out.

TL;DR

Joy after loss feels like a betrayal because we have been taught that grief and love are opposites, and that to smile again is to turn away from the person we lost. The truth is the opposite. Research on grief and post-traumatic growth shows that distress and growth coexist in the same person, and that a continuing bond with the person who died helps rather than hurts. Agony and joy can live in the same day. Letting joy back in is not a betrayal; it is grief and love turning into one another, and it is how you keep carrying them forward instead of leaving them behind.

Key Takeaways

  • Joy and grief can coexist in the same day, and feeling one does not erase or weaken the other.
  • The feeling that joy is a betrayal comes from a false belief that love and loss are opposites rather than the same thread.
  • Post-traumatic growth is measured positive change, and research shows distress and growth sit side by side in the same grieving person.
  • A continuing bond with the child you lost is not a symptom of being stuck; it is a healthy part of carrying them forward.
  • Letting small moments of light back in is how you honor them, not how you abandon them.

Why does joy feel like a betrayal?

It feels like a betrayal because we have confused grief with love. Somewhere along the way, we absorbed the idea that the depth of your sorrow is the measure of your devotion, and that to smile, to laugh, to enjoy a meal or a morning, is to signal that the loss does not matter as much anymore. That is not grief. That is a lie grief tells you when it is afraid of being left.

I know the feeling from the inside. After my son Anthony died by suicide, there were days when a single moment of lightness felt like a kind of disloyalty to him. How could I let myself feel any of it when he was gone? The answer I kept arriving at, slowly and against my own resistance, was that love is not a savings account that grief withdraws from until it is empty. Love is not depleted by joy. If anything, the joy I felt was love finding another way to reach me.

This is exactly what the research describes. Grief experts have shown that mourning is not a straight line from pain to relief; it is an ongoing back and forth between confronting the loss and rebuilding a life, and both are part of the same honest process American Psychological Association: Grief. The moments of light are not a departure from grief. They are part of it.

Can joy and agony coexist?

They can, and they do. This is not a comforting metaphor; it is what the data shows. The researchers who gave us the framework of post-traumatic growth, Tedeschi and Calhoun, describe it as the measurable positive change that can grow out of the struggle with a life crisis, not instead of that struggle PTGI: What is post-traumatic growth?. Growth does not wait until the pain is finished. It arrives inside the pain.

A study of bereaved college students put it even more plainly. It found that distress and post-traumatic growth coexist in the same person, at the same time - that you can be deeply hurting and still growing, still finding meaning, still letting in small measures of good Taku et al., 2008: Distress and post-traumatic growth coexist. That one finding undid years of my own false belief. I had been waiting for the grief to finish before I would permit myself to feel anything good again. Grief does not finish that way.

When I finally stopped treating joy and sorrow as competitors, something shifted. I could hold the ache for Anthony in one hand and still notice the sun on the water in the other. Both were true. Neither canceled the other out.

What does grief and love turning into one another mean?

Grief and love are a kind of turning - one thing becoming another inside you. The love does not go away when the person does. It needs somewhere to live, and when it cannot reach the person anymore, it transforms. Some of it becomes sorrow, and some of it becomes the quiet resolve to keep going, and some of it, against every expectation, becomes joy.

I heard this described once as grief and love transforming each other, and it named something I had been living without a word for. The love you have for your child does not evaporate. It keeps working on you. It becomes the thing that lets you find meaning again, that makes you kinder, that pulls you back toward life when grief would rather keep you curled up in the dark.

This is the continuing bond the grief researchers talk about. A lasting inner connection to the person who died - the warmth, the memory, the sense that they are still with you in some way - supports rather than blocks your healing Taku et al., 2008: Distress and post-traumatic growth coexist. Keeping them close is not what stops you from feeling joy. It is what makes the joy safe to feel.

How does spiritual connection make room for joy?

Because it changes what the joy points to. If you believe the person you lost is simply gone, ended, erased, then every good thing after them can feel like a moving on that abandons them. But if the bond continues - if Anthony is still part of me, still guiding me, still present in a way I cannot fully explain - then joy stops being a disloyalty and becomes a way of being with him again.

I do not ask anyone to believe what I believe about that. I only know what it did to me. When I came to see that my connection to Anthony did not end on the day he died, the guilt that had pinned down every good feeling began to loosen. Joy became a kind of reunion, not a forgetting. It was the same turning again: the love kept going, and joy was one of the shapes it took.

You do not have to hold any particular faith for this to help. The research on continuing bonds does not require it either - it simply observes that people who maintain a healthy inner relationship with the person they lost tend to adjust better over time American Psychological Association: Grief. The mechanism is the same whether you call it spiritual, psychological, or just love that outlasted a body.

What does finding peace in the paradox look like?

It looks small and unremarkable from the outside. It looks like laughing at something and then, a beat later, remembering and going quiet, and then letting the laughter come back anyway. It looks like a morning you wake up and do not immediately remember, and then the remembering does not flatten the whole day the way it used to. It looks like holding two true things at once without needing them to reconcile: I miss him with everything I am, and I am glad to be alive.

That paradox is not a problem to solve. It is the place you settle into. When I wrote about losing my purpose before I could find anything new, I was still living under the old rule I lost my purpose first. The rule said grief and joy were mutually exclusive, and that to heal meant the love had to shrink. That rule never helped me. The opposite does.

I have said before that post-traumatic growth is not closure, and this is part of why post-traumatic growth is not closure. There is no closure that will make the love stop, and there should not be. Growth is learning to carry the love and the loss and the joy in the same pair of hands. It is not betrayal. It is what carrying them means. That is the same path I traced when I first asked what it means to find a way forward after losing a child to suicide finding a way forward after losing a child to suicide, and letting joy back in is one of its milestones, not a detour from it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it okay to feel happy after losing a child?

Yes. Feeling joy again is not disloyalty, and it is not evidence that your grief was shallow. Research on grief and post-traumatic growth shows that positive feelings coexist with ongoing distress in the same person, and they are a sign of healing, not forgetting Taku et al., 2008: Distress and post-traumatic growth coexist.

Does feeling joy mean I am moving on?

No. It means you are moving through. Joy does not mean you love them less or that the loss is complete. A continuing bond with the person who died is healthy, and joy is one of the ways that bond keeps reaching you American Psychological Association: Grief.

How do I hold joy and pain together?

Stop asking them to take turns. Let both be true at once, and release the belief that one cancels the other. Notice the small moments of light without apologizing for them, and let the ache sit beside them instead of moving it out of the way.

Sources cited in this analysis?

If you are grieving the loss of a child to suicide, you do not have to carry it alone. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention offers loss-survivor resources at afsp.org. If you or someone you love is thinking about suicide, help is available 24 hours a day - call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.