Rediscovering the Joy and Purpose in Life

In mid December I was deep in holiday mode. Family was coming to visit, the calendar was full, and I was happily lost in the details of it all. Gifts, meals, plans. I was eagerly awaiting the season to begin.

Then the call came.

My father-in-law had fallen. A hospital admission, a flu diagnosis, dehydration and then, quickly and quietly, something more serious. The doctors told us that major interventions might extend his life slightly, but not in any way he would have wanted and so the very difficult decision was made to move him to palliative care.

The family all gathered by his bedside, and we did the hardest and most human thing there is - we waited, and watched until he quietly passed away. A funeral was planned and then less than two weeks later, my husband and I boarded a flight we had booked many months ago and left to visit Portual and Spain. We thought the break may help us in decompressing from this extremely sad experience.

And the trip was beautiful. The sights, the food, the wine. But I did come home emptied out in a way I hadn't expected. The busyness that had always carried me forward had gone strangely still. I found myself asking questions I didn't know how to answer - What do I actually want? What matters now? What is the point of any of this?

I became acutely aware of time in a way I never had before. How fast it moves. How quickly and quietly we age inside it. The things that used to light me up personally had lost their pull. And I realized, maybe for the first time, that I didn't actually know what joy looked like for me anymore.

So I started looking.

I started small by journalling. I spent quiet mornings with my thoughts and a pen. It felt almost indulgent at first - sitting still, just thinking - but I kept at it. And the more I wrote, the more I began to see what had actually been weighing on me. It turned out it was much more than I'd realized.

First there was my mother.

She had been diagnosed with dementia a few years back. Caring for someone as they drift away from you is its own particular kind of complicated grief - slow, ongoing, and easy to minimize because the person is still here. I watched as her world shrank. Names she had known for decades became strangers to her. People she had loved deeply turned into faces she couldn't place. The life she had lived was leaving her memory faster than I could hold onto it.

They say caregivering can cause you to age by eight years and I believe it. Even when you have support, it never fully leaves your mind. It seems to always live in the background of every ordinary day.

And somewhere in the journaling, I realized something else. Because my mother had been widowed and then, not that soon after, diagnosed with dementia, I had never truly grieved my father. My mother's needs had always been something more pressing so his loss had been quietly placed away in the back of my mind.

I began to wonder if losing my father-in-law had cracked something open. If one grief had finally made room for another. And in that space, my own mortality walked in uninvited. I started to worry - about my health, my future, the shape of my older years. Would I become a burden to my children? Would this happen to me? The thoughts compounded, each one pulling me a little deeper.

I could feel myself heading somewhere dark. And I knew, with a clarity that surprised me, that I had to pull out.

I had to find the joy in my life. But I just didn't know yet where to look.

And then, in the middle of all that questioning, a thought came in quietly.

My family.

Not as an obligation or a responsibility - I'd always felt that. But as a source of pure, uncomplicated joy. My kids. My grandkids. Their partners. The particular way that I felt when we were all in the same room together.

I thought about my grandkids and how watching them grow is one of the most quietly extraordinary things I've ever experienced. The way their personalities were developing. The laughs we share that feel effortless - the kind where you're not performing happiness, you're just in it.

Being with them doesn't require anything of me except showing up. And every single time, without fail, it makes me smile.

It sounds simple. But I think that's exactly the point.

I had been searching for joy as though it were something I needed to build or earn or figure out. And here it was, already woven into my life, waiting for me to stop moving long enough to feel it.

That was the first crack of light.

And it wasn't just family.

I thought about my friends. The ones I can sit with for hours and lose track of time entirely. The ones who, on a bad day, send exactly the right meme at exactly the right moment and somehow it helps. There's a particular comfort in friendships that have depth and in knowing that certain people are simply there should I ever need them.

I thought about the life I have. A home I love. Places I get to visit. People who show up. When I actually stopped to look at it -instead of rushing past it - what I saw was abundance.

And then something shifted in how I thought about purpose.

I had always carried a quiet belief that life needed to mean something significant to feel worthwhile. That purpose had to be large - a legacy, an achievement, a contribution you could point to. If you couldn't answer the question "what are you here for?" with something substantial, were you really doing it right?

I'm not so sure anymore.

What if purpose doesn't have to be grand? What if it's allowed to be honest and ordinary and enough?

Enjoy the day. That could be a purpose.

Spend time with people who make you feel good. That could be a purpose.

Bring joy to someone else's life. That, too, could be a purpose.

None of these would have satisfied me before. They would have felt too small, too passive and just not enough. But after everything, they felt like exactly enough. More than enough, actually. They felt like wisdom I had to challenge in order to find.

But there's one thing I want to be clear about - I still haven't got it figured out.

I'm still looking. I'm still turning things over, still asking questions, still some mornings not entirely sure what I'm reaching for. But somewhere along the way I realized something else: the looking itself might be the point. The fact that I'm still curious and still open means I'm still receptive. And receptivity, I'm also learning, is where the joy gets in.

Because here's what I've also realized: I already have so much of it.

I have it in my family, in long dinners and easy laughter and grandchildren who are becoming more wonderfully themselves every time I see them. I have it in friends who know exactly when to show up and what to say. I have it in a home I love, in travel, in the particular pleasure of seeing something new for the first time. I feel it when I help others. I see it when I watch a sunset. I taste it in the new foods I get to try. And I know it in the smiles of the people around me.

And what surprised me is that I have it in grief too.

As much as I carry the loss of my father and my father-in-law, remembering them brings me joy. As I look at pictures I'm discovering that memories are not a wound. The people we have loved and lost don't disappear - they live in the stories we tell and the moments we return to.

Even my mother, in the midst of her dementia, taught me something. On my last visit, someone pointed out that even though I might have thought her life was so limited, she brings joy to other residents in her care home as she sits with them, talking, simply being present. Here, in the place I had only been able to see through the lens of loss, she was still herself in the ways that mattered most. Maybe that is her joy. Maybe joy finds a way in, even when everything else is falling away.

Which makes me think that the real trick isn't finding joy somewhere out there, waiting to be discovered. It's learning to look for it in whatever is already in front of you. The good in a hard moment. The warmth in an ordinary day. The meaning in small things that are only small if you're moving too fast to notice them.

So I'm now committed to daily looking for the joy in my life along with trying to bring joy to others. That, I think, could be enough - and in fact may even possibly be everything.