On Friday we are hosting our first Seder since my father’s suicide. Sometimes there are tangible milestones that allow me to know I am healing.

Year one I could not bear to even read the Haggadah, we simply ate a Passover dinner. Year two I managed the telling of the story, but gone was the joy I once found in the holiday. Those years it was simply the five of us, as I did not want witnesses to my pain & struggle.

But I finally feel ready to open our home and fill that space with friends, music and a lively, boisterous & celebratory Seder. I know that I will never be healed from the trauma & loss of my father’s suicide. There will always be a hole in my heart, and a wound in my soul. But I am healing. I have lived in my own personal Egypt for almost three years now. I have wandered the desert of the valley of the shadow, picking up the pieces and learning to live a new normal. There is no Promised Land that will ever allow me to go back to the person I was before my father took his own life. And grief has no Promised Land that marks a finish line. It’s a lifelong process, this much I know.

The waters of pain & sorrow, guilt & trauma did not magically part. I have had to wade through them, trusting that I would not be pulled under, trusting the lifeboats of love that surrounded me, trusting my own endurance & strength. But in doing so, I have found a different kind of promise … the promise of renewed joy, the promise of letting go, the promise of hope, the promise of forgiveness & the promise of resilience. That is the sweetness that I will celebrate this year. And for that, I am profoundly grateful.