By: Angelina Mazzuoccolo
Why choosing joy after loss isn’t a betrayal of love, and what healing really looks like.
One persistent misconception about grief is that it and joy exist on opposite ends of a spectrum, and that moving toward one means moving away from the other. That healing means the grief recedes. That happiness is evidence of recovery. That if you are laughing, you must be over it.
Kate McKay knows from the inside of that myth how much damage it does. She lost her son, Will, and she has spent the years since learning something that the myth makes almost impossible to see. Joy and grief can occupy the same life, the same hour, the same five minutes. Not because the grief is less, but because the capacity of the human heart is larger than most people give it credit for.
Grief and Grace is built around that understanding, and it is one of the reasons the book feels different from so many others in the grief space.
The Guilt That Comes With Joy
One of the most common and least discussed experiences of grief is the guilt that arrives when joy begins to return. The moment you laugh at something and then feel immediate shame for having laughed. The moment you enjoy a meal or a conversation or a piece of music and then wonder whether that enjoyment is somehow a betrayal of the person you lost.
Kate addresses this with the directness of someone who has felt it herself. Your joy is not a betrayal, she writes. You don’t prove how much you loved someone by remaining miserable forever. The person you love is part of you now. Take that love with you. Laugh. Travel. Dance. Fall in love. Try something new. Have dessert.
Living fully doesn’t diminish the person who died. It can be one of the most beautiful ways we honor them, because it insists on the value of life even in the face of loss.
Positivity Is Not the Absence of Grief
Kate is also honest about something that affects people who, like her, are known for their energy and optimism. People often see her positivity and assume it means she has moved past her grief. She has not. She carries it with her. But she has learned that grief and joy can coexist, and that her intentionality about joy is itself a product of loss. She knows how quickly life can change. When there is something to celebrate, she celebrates it. When there is love, she expresses it. When there is an opportunity to live, she takes it.
There isn’t one face of grief, she reminds readers. A person can be laughing, succeeding, and loving life, and still deeply miss someone they love. Those things are not contradictions. They are the full, complicated truth of a life that has been through something and kept going.
What Healing Actually Looks Like From the Inside
Kate describes the moment she realized she was going to survive her grief not as a single dramatic breakthrough but as an accumulation of small ones. Getting out of bed. Going for a walk. Laughing and realizing she hadn’t betrayed anyone by laughing. Making a plan with a friend and not wanting to cancel. Helping somebody else. Praying.
Eventually those small moments began adding up to a life that felt like it was worth something more. Healing wasn’t one giant revelation. It was choosing life again and again, even through the hurt. That description, honest and unglamorous and completely recognizable, is what gives the book its particular power. It doesn’t promise a transformation that arrives all at once. It offers her perspective on what moving through grief can look like in practice, one small choice at a time.
When Losses Multiply
Kate also addresses something that often goes unspoken in grief literature. Sometimes grief isn’t one loss. Another loss comes. Then another disappointment, another change, another person we love is struggling, and suddenly we are not grieving one thing anymore. We are carrying layers.
Her advice for those moments is practical and grounded. Make the world smaller for a while. Ask what you need today, not for the rest of your life. Who can you call? Can you get outside? Can you eat something, sleep, cry, or simply sit with someone who doesn’t need you to be okay?
She has learned not to confuse this hurts right now with my life will always feel this way. That distinction, small as it sounds, is one of the most protective things a grieving person can hold onto.
For anyone who has wondered whether joy and grief can coexist, Kate McKay explores that question in Grief and Grace, available on Amazon.
