Some Words – And My Word of the Year – for 2026

/ Katie

I wonder how many times this year I will be called upon to grieve.

How many times will I grieve for the world, for senseless violence and gleeful cruelty and hatred turned into policy? And how many for my corner of it?

My uncle died yesterday after a short battle with aggressive cancer. He was a good man, though like so many others he wasn’t at his best all the time. I remember a year when he pretended to pour beer on my birthday cake. I also remember singing with him, seeing him smile and laugh and just be there with our family at my parents’ basement karaoke bar, which a family friend lovingly titled “Club Doozie’s.”

That family friend passed away in the fall, after a long battle with aggressive cancer.

Graham lost his aunt in the summer. Her daughter, sick in the end-stages of aggressive cancer, made it to the funeral, and died only a few days later.

And the big one. My dad.

My dad has cancer. I don’t know that he’d like me putting it out there, and to be fair it isn’t my news or my diagnosis to share. But he is mine. And my fear and my grief belong to me, too. He’s never even broken a bone, despite years of sports and motorcycles. His prognosis is good, as far as we know, but to see him struggling with this, to know that cancer might take him from me, feels like something out of a story. Not something out of my own life.

It’s the shock, I think, always. Even if you see it coming. It’s the shock, that moment of “this can’t be happening,” that drags you into the dark.

Right now, we’re living through a regime that wants us shocked. They want us so wrapped up in the news cycle, in atrocities and trauma and broken laws, that we don’t have the space for any other reaction. But grief is a reaction.

Grief is resistance.

To grieve in the face of such abject and inhuman malice, to be soft, to feel pain, that is resistance. To be sad when they want you to be scared, and to feel tears when they want you to feel your heart beat fast in your chest, that is resistance.

And grief is strength. To look sadness and tragedy in the eye and keep going, to feel deeply even when it hurts, to allow yourself that time and space and know that you have to feel it to get through it, that is strength.

This is not the post I’d intended to write today. Or, yesterday, as it were, but the day got away from me. I was going to write about my word of the year for 2026. It’s “LISTEN,” by the way.  

But I guess it still works, doesn’t it? I’m up at 4:00 a.m. with a cold and a sinus infection, unable to sleep, taking this quiet time to write, listening to what my brain and my soul need – to get this down on paper, to get it out of my head. I’m listening to my grief, and letting it take its course. When I feel a little better, I’ll listen to my heart, and allow it to lead me this year – to the people I love, to the life I’m building, to the quiet, fallow places that help you grow.

And on that journey, I’ll keep listening to my grief, too. I’ll listen, and I’ll let it open me up like a wound and I’ll bleed out sadness and love, and I’ll share that love with everyone I can.

Because what else can any of us do, in a time like this?

20 thoughts on “Some Words – And My Word of the Year – for 2026”

  1. i am so sorry for your grieving. it comes in so many forms — anticipatory, and as the past recedes and we feel something real slipping away. thank God, as someone reminded me the other day, love never dies. and the love that continues is as real as it ever was. (written by someone who just within the hour was standing above her father’s gravestone, remembering how deeply i loved to curl into that papa …

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  2. Thank you for sharing this. I struggled with this same thing about a year and a half ago, after a spate of losses in my life over a short span of time. I spoke to a therapist about it all, and that I was stuck in a cycle of numbness. Her advice was to

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      • Thank you for sharing this advice! I like the idea of action, and I do find that writing is what I come back to, always. I’m sorry you went through a rough time, too. Life is certainly full of seasons.

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  9. grief … sucks. But without it there would not be love. Because when one greaves someone is because that person loved that one. I know I will greave till the day i die. For i have loved so many people (and when I say people i include my furry family) but i will also remember why i did greave. and there is light in that.

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