My mom didn’t tell me to stop grieving.
She didn’t tell me to forget the life I had with Quintin.
She didn’t tell me to simply “move on.”
She looked me straight in the eyes, held my hand, and asked me to do something that sounded so simple…
and yet felt almost impossible.
Choose happy.
Those words have stayed with me.
And I think I’m only now beginning to understand what she was really giving me.
Help your kids find happy…and choose happy!
She Had Been Telling Me for Almost Two Years
After Q passed away, Mom would say things to me like:
“Lori, Q is in Heaven.”
“He wouldn’t want you to spend the rest of your life sad.”
“He would want you to live.”
I knew what she meant.
I really did.
I knew she wasn’t minimizing my grief.
She wasn’t asking me to forget my husband.
She was my mom. She had watched me love Quintin for most of my adult life. She knew what losing him had done to me.
She had watched me try to figure out how to breathe in a life I never imagined I would have to live.
So intellectually, I understood her.
But if I’m being truthful…
Her words never completely landed.
They made sense in my head.
My heart just wasn’t ready to receive them.
There is a big difference between knowing someone you love would want you to keep living…
and actually knowing how to do it.
I could tell myself Q would want me happy.
I could tell myself he was with Jesus.
I could tell myself I still had four beautiful children and a life God had entrusted to me.
But grief doesn’t always respond to what you know.
Sometimes your heart has to catch up.
And mine was still learning.
We Thought We Were Celebrating the End of Cancer
Not long before everything changed again, our family went to Nashville to celebrate Mom.
My sisters were there.
Most of the grandkids were there.
We gathered because Mom was cancer-free.
After everything she had endured, it felt like we were finally getting to celebrate something good.
And if grief has taught me anything, it’s that you learn to treasure those moments differently after you’ve experienced loss.
You take the pictures.
You make the trip.
You laugh a little louder.
You linger a little longer.
Because somewhere inside you now understands just how quickly everything can change.
We celebrated Mom.
We celebrated life.
We celebrated healing.
We had no idea how much we would treasure that time together.
Then in November, Mom was diagnosed again. She started treatments and decided to live her life fully.
She was doing well for a while, and we continued believing, hoping and praying.
Then she became terribly ill with a bowel perforation, while on a cruise in Mexico with my sister. Unfortunately, one of the side effects from those treatments was micro perforation of the bowel.
What followed felt like another nightmare our family somehow found ourselves living.
Trying to get Mom back home.
Being stuck in California for weeks.
Hospital rooms.
Doctors.
Questions.
Hope.
Setbacks.
Prayers.
More questions.
And eventually, after everything her body had been through, she simply could not heal.
Mom entered hospice.
There is something uniquely painful about knowing someone you love is dying.
I had already experienced sudden loss with Q—the kind of loss that rips someone out of your life without warning and leaves you standing in a fog wondering how the world is still moving when yours has completely stopped.
This was different.
Not easier.
Just different.
There is an agony in knowing goodbye is coming.
But hidden inside that agony can also be an incredible gift:
time to say the things that need to be said.
And Mom gave me one of those gifts.
“I Want You to Be Happy”
There is one conversation I don’t think I will ever forget.
Mom was nearing the end of her life.
She looked directly at me.
She held my hand.
And she told me she wanted me to find happiness.
Not someday in some vague distant future.
She wanted happiness for me.
She reminded me again that Quintin would want that for me too.
She wanted me to live.
She wanted me to make memories with my kids.
She wanted me to be happy.
And there was something about the way she said it that day that was different.
Maybe it was because I knew there wouldn’t be endless opportunities for her to say it again.
Maybe it was the tears in her eyes.
Maybe it was the way she held my hand.
Or maybe it was because, for the first time, I realized just how deeply she needed me to believe her.
It almost felt like she was begging me.
Lori, please choose happy.
My mom was not someone who usually talked the way I do.
If you know me, you know I’m a vision caster.
I dream.
I speak life over people.
I can see something that doesn’t exist yet and believe God can build it.
I love talking about possibilities and what could be.
Mom?
Not so much. 😂
Mom was practical.
Matter-of-fact.
A realist.
If something was happening right in front of you, she was probably going to tell you exactly what was happening right in front of you.
No sugarcoating.
No grand speech about some beautiful future she envisioned.
That was one of the ways we were different.
Which is precisely why what she said next meant so much to me.
She looked at me, with tears in her eyes, and told me:
“I know without a doubt in my heart that you’ll have an amazing family someday. Trust it. Choose happy.”
I already had an amazing family.
She knew that.
She adored my children.
She loved what Q and I had built.
She wasn’t telling me that the family I had wasn’t enough.
I believe she was telling me that she didn’t think our family’s story was finished.
That there could still be something ahead.
That God could still add chapters to a story I thought had already been written.
And my very practical, very realistic mother wanted me to believe that too.
Why I Think She Chose the Word “Happy”
I’ve thought a lot about those words.
Choose happy.
Why happy?
As a Christian, I know happiness and joy are not the same thing.
My joy is not dependent upon my circumstances.
My joy comes from Jesus Christ.
Mom knew that.
She knew where my hope was.
She knew that even in my darkest days after losing Q, I had clung desperately to the Lord.
She knew Jesus was the reason I was still standing.
So I don’t believe she was talking about some shallow version of happiness where you pretend life doesn’t hurt.
She wasn’t telling me to plaster a smile on my face.
She wasn’t telling me to stop grieving.
And she certainly wasn’t telling me another person would somehow become the source of my happiness.
I think she used the word happy because happiness would require something from me.
A choice.
Not a choice to feel happy every morning.
Grief doesn’t work like that.
But a choice to keep participating in my life.
A choice to laugh when something is funny instead of immediately feeling guilty.
A choice to make the trip.
A choice to sit around the dinner table.
A choice to dream again.
A choice to believe there could still be beautiful things ahead.
A choice to take the next step before I knew exactly where it would lead.
Maybe choosing happy meant choosing not to build my home in sorrow.
There would always be sorrow.
There still is.
But sorrow did not have to become my permanent address.
My joy was secure in Jesus.
Maybe Mom was simply telling me:
Now go live the life He still gave you.
Then She Was Gone
God, how much more?
I had fought so hard to believe there was still life ahead after losing Q.
And suddenly I could feel myself slipping back toward a place I recognized.
Survival.
Only this time, something inside me wanted to surrender to it completely.
I started feeling sorry for myself.
I started looking at my circumstances and thinking maybe this was simply what my life was going to be now.
Loss.
Grief.
Responsibility.
Just keep focusing on the kids.
Just pour everything into them.
Maybe that would be enough.
Maybe whatever dreams I had for the rest of my life needed to disappear.
Maybe the safest thing was to simply stop hoping for anything more.
I sat in that place for a few weeks.
And it was dark.
There were things I didn’t even know how to explain to anyone.
I also didn’t want to burden my children.
They were grieving too.
They had lost their dad.
Now they had lost their Meme
They were trying to make sense of two enormous losses in such a short portion of their young lives.
The last thing I wanted was for them to feel responsible for carrying me too.
So there were moments when it was simply me…
and God.
Rise Up
Then one day, I felt something change.
Not my circumstances.
Not my grief.
Me.
I felt the Holy Spirit press something deeply into my heart:
Rise up.
I had heard those words before in a different way.
Almost a year earlier, I had listened to a podcast about learning to dance again.
It became so significant to me that I eventually wrote about it in my blog, Learning to Dance Again.
The idea was simple but incredibly difficult:
Sometimes God asks you to dance before you feel ready.
Before the music makes sense.
Before your heart feels light enough.
Before you know all the steps.
Sometimes obedience begins before the emotion catches up.
And suddenly I felt like I was standing there all over again.
God wasn’t asking me to stop missing my mom.
He wasn’t asking me to stop missing Q.
He wasn’t asking me to pretend everything was okay.
But I felt Him asking me:
Are you going to stay here?
Not physically.
Spiritually.
Emotionally.
Was I going to allow everything I had lost to convince me there was nothing left?
Or was I willing to trust that the God who had carried me this far was still writing?
I didn’t feel ready.
I didn’t know exactly what came next.
But maybe that was the point.
Faith does not require me to see the whole staircase before I take the next step.
Sometimes faith looks like getting up while you’re still crying.
Sometimes faith looks like saying yes while part of your heart is terrified.
Sometimes faith looks like choosing happy before you actually feel very happy at all.
Maybe Choosing Happy Was an Act of Faith
I think that is what Mom understood before I did.
Choosing happy wasn’t about having happiness already intact.
It was about choosing to believe happiness could exist again.
There is a difference.
I didn’t need to wait until I felt completely healed to begin living.
I didn’t need every question answered.
I didn’t need all the guilt gone.
I didn’t need to know exactly what God was doing.
I simply needed enough faith to take the next step.
God had already been teaching me that life is painfully short.
Q’s death taught me that in an instant.
Mom’s death taught me in another way.
Q didn’t know his last day was his last day.
Mom knew her days were growing short and chose to spend some of her precious strength telling her daughter:
Live yours.
How could I ignore that?
Not because Mom was now the one directing my future.
Not because I believe Q or Mom somehow replaced the voice of the Holy Spirit in my life.
They didn’t.
God has been the One holding me this entire time.
God is the One I seek.
God is the One who leads me.
God is the One writing whatever comes next.
But I do believe He has used the words, lives and legacies of the people I loved to teach me how precious this life is.
I remember the way Q lived.
I remember what Mom told me.
And I hear the Lord continually reminding me:
Don’t waste the life I have placed in front of you because you’re afraid of what living might mean.
Saying Yes Before I Was Ready
This is the part where I think people sometimes misunderstand what “choosing happy” looked like for me.
It wasn’t suddenly deciding I needed another relationship.
It wasn’t downloading an app because I needed someone to make me whole.
And it certainly wasn’t deciding that grief was over.
Choosing happy happened in much smaller ways first.
Getting up.
Going out.
Talking to people.
Making plans.
Traveling.
Laughing.
Allowing myself to imagine a future instead of continually replaying the past.
Letting my children encourage me.
Being willing to do something uncomfortable simply because maybe God was using it to stretch me.
Months earlier, my daughter had encouraged me—really more like dared me—to try Facebook Dating.
I did.
Very briefly.
And that’s where I had crossed paths with a man named Raymond.
But I wasn’t ready.
So nothing really happened.
Life continued.
Then Mom became sick.
Everything else disappeared into the background.
And after she died, dating was probably the furthest thing from my mind.
But about two weeks later, during that season when I felt the Holy Spirit telling me to rise up, another thought kept returning to me.
Reach out.
There was someone I had spoken to months earlier.
And eventually, I did reach out.
But I don’t want to tell that story here.
Not yet.
Because I don’t want the lesson of Mom’s final blessing to become:
My mom told me to be happy, so I found Raymond.
That isn’t the story.
Raymond isn’t the source of my happiness.
And he isn’t the reason I got back up.
Jesus is.
God had already been doing that work long before another relationship entered my life.
What Mom gave me was permission to stop believing that staying sad was somehow proof of how deeply I had loved.
She gave me permission to open my hands to life again.
Whatever God chose to put in them.
The Gift Hidden Inside Goodbye
I would never choose the way I lost either of them.
I would never choose the trauma of losing Q suddenly.
And I would never choose the pain of watching Mom’s body fail.
But the two losses taught me different things.
Sudden loss taught me:
Say it now.
Take the picture.
Make the trip.
Say I love you.
Forgive.
Call.
Show up.
Stop assuming you’ll have tomorrow.
Losing Mom slowly taught me something else.
There can be sacred gifts hidden inside a goodbye you know is coming.
Conversations you might not otherwise have.
Questions you finally ask.
Hands you hold a little tighter.
Words spoken with an urgency neither person can ignore.
I hate that Mom had to be dying for us to have that conversation.
But I will be grateful for the rest of my life that she used some of her final strength to give me those words.
Choose happy.
She wasn’t only encouraging me in that room.
She was leaving me something I could carry after she was gone.
A blessing.
A challenge.
A reminder.
Mom, I’m Trying
I wish I could call her now.
There are so many things I would tell her.
I would tell her about my kids.
I would tell her what they’re doing.
I would tell her about Hawaii.
I would tell her about the moments I have laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe.
I’d tell her about the moments grief still catches me completely off guard.
I’d probably ask her about a hundred questions I wish I had thought to ask while she was here.
And I think I would tell her:
Mom, I’m trying.
I’m trying to choose happy.
Not every day looks happy.
Some days still hurt terribly.
Some days I miss Q so much it feels impossible that this is my life.
Some days I would give anything to hear her voice.
But I’m learning that choosing happy doesn’t require pretending those things aren’t true.
It simply means they don’t get to be the only things that are true.
I have lost tremendously.
And I am incredibly blessed.
I carry sorrow.
And I carry joy.
I miss the people who are gone.
And I deeply love the people who are still here.
I can grieve yesterday and still believe God has something for tomorrow.
Both can be true.
Her Final Blessing
When I look back now, I don’t believe Mom was asking me to leave my grief behind.
I think she was asking me not to let grief become the only life I allowed myself to live.
She knew where my ultimate joy came from.
Jesus.
She knew another person could never heal what only He could heal.
She wasn’t asking me to replace the love I lost.
She was asking me to trust God enough to believe that love, laughter, adventure and happiness were still allowed to exist in my story.
Keep living.
Keep laughing.
Keep dreaming.
Keep loving your kids.
Keep taking the trip.
Keep saying yes.
Keep trusting God.
Choose happy.
Not because life is easy.
Not because grief is gone.
Not because tomorrow is guaranteed.
But precisely because it isn’t.
Mom’s words feel different to me now than they did when she first began saying them after Q died.
Back then, I heard them as advice.
Now I hear them as a blessing.
And I am carrying that blessing with me into whatever God writes next.
But there is one more piece of this story I need to share before I tell you what happened after Mom died.
Because Mom wasn’t the only person whose words gave me permission to keep living.
Long before I understood why I would ever need them…
Quintin left me words of his own.
Words I carried through the darkest days after he died.
Words about me.
About our children.
About life after him.
And words that have taken on an entirely different meaning as God has begun leading me into a chapter I never imagined I would live.
I’ve shared pieces before.
But I think it’s finally time to tell you what that letter has meant to me.
That is the story I’m going to tell you next. ❤️
