UpJourney / When Life Gives You Lemons

Life handed me a truckload of lemons when my wife died at the age of 34. It was a devastating time, but I also thought about how my then ten-year-old daughter would want us to carry on after the loss. Would she want us to be morose and cry all the time or would want us to get on with our lives and keep the joyful memory of the person we loved alive?

I chose the latter and set out to have an adventure with my daughter. We needed a reprieve. We needed something that would lift our spirits. We needed something that would help us put our loss behind us. So I booked a trip on the ferry system on the Inside Passage in Alaska. It was the perfect thing to help take our mind off of our loss, at least for a while.

The trip did all of that and more. It bonded us together. It helped us openly talk about “Mommy.” And gave us exciting memories, like seeing Puffins, taking seaplane rides, and spending the night next to a glacier. We still talk about some of those things today, many years later.

What the experience taught me was that we can take the sour times that all of us will probably encounter sometime in our life and turn them into something more palatable.

Original post here!