Personal Blog | April 7th, 2025

Witnessing my 82 year old grandparents grieve their son is a whole other twisted aspect of losing someone that I hadn't considered. It deepens it. Complicates it.

Every person who mourns him reminds me that we are not a singular experience as humans. Each relationship is a unique expression of our energy signature. We have distinct exchanges that are never replicated.

No one will ever get to know the same version of my dad as I had. I will never experience the exact same version of dad my sisters did.

And when I think of it like that, who he was a person expands. Like a kaleidoscope, he becomes new with each turn.

I've spent my life knowing him as a daughter from that singular vantage point but long before he was my father, his energy interacted with thousands of others. After I left his home, he interacted with thousands and thousands more.

Each time we interact with someone, it alters us in some way. Sometimes these changes are quick, altering us only briefly like the friendly barista who brightens our morning or the obnoxious co-worker who grates you.

Sometimes those people make longer lasting impacts on our energy signatures, altering it for the long term. For better or worse and sometimes both at once. Maybe these interactions create a bias or a stereotype; maybe they collapses preconceived notions or makes us question what we believed.

This belief also encourages us to be thoughtful about how we spend our energy and with whom we allow to alter us. It's a symbiotic dance of souls and the people we intentionally share energy with is of utmost importance. A reminder to us all to choose with high standards and invest your energy in the relationships we want to be full.

It’s all so much more beautiful when I think of what an honor it was to be one of the four humans in this life to have experienced being his daughter.

I think I’ve struggled to share too much on my grief journey thus far because I don’t know how to balance the denser emotions I'm currently experiencing (like anger, resentment, despair) that are complicated with abandonment and trauma against the fondness I had for my father. I loved him in spite of everything. And even despite it all, he was a good father and a good man. Not perfect. But good.

I don’t want the world to judge him as who he was at the end of his life and the hurt he’s caused me because that was just a fraction of our relationship and further more, it was only one facet of him… only one relationship. To everyone else he is remembered bathed in light but… I am not so lucky. It’s a burden I feel my soul must endure.

This feels like the next initiation. Not to just hold faith and light when times are good. But to hold faith and light even in the aftermath of tragedy and navigating the storms of life.

I know this is a hard lesson of human hood and each of us will spend our time suffering it. It is the payment of the love we shared and Death comes to settle the debt.

I hope this blog finds you well, mystics.

Until next time—

Toni

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