My intention for 2018 is HOPE.

Kristen Wood, author, fellow loss mom, and contributor over at Still Standing Magazine, mentioned that each year, rather than make resolutions for herself, she chooses a word as a theme for the year.  (You can find her at @authorkristinwood on Facebook, and on the Still Standing Writer’s Page)  I really like this idea, because I feel that choosing a word as a guiding principle is much more feasible than a handful of resolutions that I have the potential to fail at achieving. I’m embracing this now because I believe it’s an uplifting, lovely way to begin a new year.

So, ‘Hope’ it is.  In 2018, I HOPE TO…

• find my Lucy’s light in all things, ordinary and extraordinary.
• share more of Lucy’s light with others. In 2017, I didn’t necessarily do enough of this because the darkness felt so vast.
• feel alive again.
• embrace possibility and to celebrate it, no matter what the potential outcome may be.
• open my heart more to others again.
• let go of the guilt I’ve been hanging on to. Losing Lucy wasn’t my fault; it’s time to stop punishing myself.
• begin loving the person that I am now. She’s endured a lot and she deserves love!
• strengthen my relationship even further with my husband.
• stop censoring my grief and be more confident in speaking about my experience.
• keep letting hope float up.
• live a life that would make Lucy proud.

Photo by Ron Smith on Unsplash

Those are my New Year’s intentions for 2018.

Hope is tenacious. It lights the way through the darkest of human experiences. It’s the quiet voice that says, “I won’t give up. There are better things ahead.”

Though hope has been something I’ve struggled to keep in the front of my mind through my loss experience, its resiliency has not failed me. It’s what has made me keep going when I’ve wanted to quit, forced me to pick myself up from the floor of despair and shown me that there’s more. There’s hope.

Time to embrace it!