Joy Is a Skill: Living Fully While You Are Grieving

At some point in the grief process, something unexpected happens.

You laugh. Or you have a genuinely good afternoon. Or you catch yourself enjoying something: a meal, a conversation, a moment of quiet sunshine, and for a few seconds, you are simply present in it.

And then the guilt arrives.

I hear about it regularly. "I felt guilty for laughing. It did not feel right to enjoy anything." Or: "I had a good day and then felt terrible about it, like I was somehow forgetting them."

If you have felt that, I want to offer you something to sit with:

Grief and joy are not in competition. Both can be true at the same time. And neither one cancels the other out.

Guilt Is Another Way We Miss Them

Grief guilt, the feeling that joy is somehow a betrayal, is one of the most common experiences people bring into therapy, and one of the least talked about.

Here is what I believe about it: guilt is another way we miss them. It is love with nowhere to go, turning inward and becoming self-punishment. It keeps us tethered to the person we lost, because feeling bad feels like proof that we have not forgotten them.

This is not a kind way to miss them.

Most of the people and pets we grieve, if we are honest about who they were and what they wanted for us, did not want us to stop living. They wanted us to be happy. To find purpose. To laugh again eventually. Allowing joy back in is not a betrayal of them. In many cases, it is one of the most honest ways to honor them.

The goal is not to choose between grief and joy. The goal is to learn to hold space for both, because both are real, and both belong.

What Dogs Know About Joy That We Tend to Forget

Manolo does not spend the afternoon regretting breakfast. He does not lie awake worrying about next Tuesday. He is, with his entire being, here.

(There is one exception. If he has eaten something he absolutely should not have and his stomach is making its displeasure known, he is very much in the present moment about that too. But that is a separate lesson.)

Watching Manolo move through a day is a quiet tutorial in skills that grief tends to erode. Not because dogs have it all figured out, but because they have not yet learned to talk themselves out of joy the way humans have.

Here is what he keeps teaching me:

Live in the moment.

Grief pulls us backward into what was and forward into what will never be. Presence, the ability to be in this moment, this breath, this patch of warmth, is not a luxury in grief. It is a lifeline. Manolo is incapable of being anywhere other than exactly where he is. We could all stand to practice that.

Celebrate the small things.

A walk, a favorite toy, a familiar voice coming through the door, a patch of afternoon sunshine on the floor, knowing we are about to leave the house to go to work. Manolo greets each of these as if they are genuinely worth celebrating, because to him, they are. Joy does not have to be large to be real. In grief especially, the small moments of goodness are often the ones that begin to rebuild us.

Connection is built through consistency, not perfection.

Manolo does not require the people he loves to show up flawlessly. He requires them to show up. Again and again, imperfectly, in whatever condition they arrive in. Grief can make us withdraw from relationships at exactly the moment we need them most. The relationships that hold us through loss are rarely the ones where everyone said the right thing. They are the ones where someone kept coming back.

Forgiveness comes more easily than we think.

Dogs do not keep score the way humans do. Manolo does not catalog grievances or rehearse old hurts. He is remarkably willing to begin again. Grief can stir up a great deal of complicated feelings, toward the person we lost, toward ourselves, toward others who did not show up the way we needed. Learning to let some of that go, when we are ready, is part of how we find our way forward.

Rest is not laziness.

Manolo understands the value of genuine downtime with his whole body. He naps without apology. He stretches out in patches of sun without guilt. Grief is exhausting in ways that sleep does not always fix. I addressed this in a previous blog. Rest is not a retreat from grief work. It is part of it.

Curiosity beats fear.

Manolo approaches the world with openness and wonder. New smells, new spaces, and new people are invitations, not threats. Grief can make the world feel dangerous and unfamiliar. Approaching what comes next with even a small amount of curiosity, wondering what is possible rather than dreading what is not, is one of the earliest signs that healing is beginning.

Joy can exist alongside hardship.

This is the one I come back to most. Dogs who have experienced illness, injury, or significant change do not wait until everything is resolved before they re-engage with life. They find what is available to them and they lean into it. Not because they are not affected, but because joy and difficulty are not mutually exclusive. They never were.

You are allowed to find moments of goodness while you are still grieving. That is not a sign that you have moved on. It is a sign that you are still here, still alive, still capable of being reached by something beautiful.

Joy Is a Skill You Can Practice

Joy does not return to a grieving person all at once. It tends to arrive the way light comes back in the early morning, gradually, almost imperceptibly, until one day you notice its presence.

Joy is a skill, something that can be cultivated intentionally and gently, even in the middle of grief. Noticing what is still good. Allowing small pleasures without immediately talking yourself out of them. Letting a moment of connection actually land instead of deflecting it. These are not distractions from grief. They are part of learning to live alongside it.

Manolo has never had to learn this. It comes naturally to him in a way it does not always come naturally to us. But that is what makes him such a good teacher. He does not tell me about presence or joy or the value of a good nap. He just demonstrates it, every single day, with his whole Labrador self.

And sometimes that is enough to remind me that it is still possible.

Coming Next Month

This month we have talked about what it means to move forward, to build trust, to ask for help, and to allow joy back in. However, sometimes the mind begins to move forward while the body has not received the message yet.

In September, I am going to talk about how grief actually lives in the body, and why it shows up as tightness in the chest, heaviness in the limbs, a nervous system that cannot quite settle, even long after the mind thinks it has moved on. I will also address why working with the body directly, through approaches like EMDR, can reach what talk alone sometimes cannot.

Grief is not only a thought. It is not only a feeling. It lives somewhere deeper than either of those, and it deserves to be met there.

You Are Allowed to Feel Good

If you take nothing else from this month, take this:

You are allowed to laugh. You are allowed to have a good day. You are allowed to enjoy something, to feel warmth, to be present in a moment that has nothing to do with loss.

That is not forgetting, betrayal, or moving on in the way people sometimes mean when they say it. Grief is not a place you leave behind.

It is moving forward, carrying them with you, and finding that life can still be worth showing up for.

Manolo figured that out after losing his companion, Shannon. He got louder, filling the silence. Then, slowly, he found his way back to joy, alongside the loss. He is not the same dog, he is different because of the grief. However, he still lives with joy in his life.

I think you can too.