Some doors open and close at the same time.

Years ago, on a single day in July, we moved into a new home. I remember boxes everywhere, that particular chaos of a beginning, and the giddy, exhausted feeling of this is where the next part of our life happens.

And on that same day — the same one — I got the phone call that my son Connor’s life had ended.

A beginning and an ending, poured into one day. One door opening on a new house. Another closing on my son’s life. Both at once. Both true. Forever now the same date on the calendar.

I don’t tell you this because it’s my story. I tell you because this week, the energy in the air is doing exactly this. It’s holding the beginning and the ending in the same hand.

A beginning that asks you to return

There’s a New Moon this week. New Moons are beginnings, fresh starts, the first thin sliver of a new cycle.

But this one is different. This is the kind of beginning that doesn’t invite you to charge forward. It asks you to go back first. To return to home, to memory, to the private truth under the public story. To the rooms you’ve lived in and the people who lived there with you.

It’s a beginning shaped like a homecoming. I think of it as a door that opens by asking you to remember another door.

Which is why, if you find yourself this week caught between moving forward and being pulled backward, planning the future with one hand while the past tugs at the other, that’s the exact shape of the week. Beginning and returning, at the same time.

Time is stranger than the calendar admits

I’ve learned that, standing at my particular door for more years than I’ll say.

Nothing changes over the years. It could be one year since that day, or it could be twenty. The distance doesn’t grow the way clocks and calendars promise it will.

We’re taught that grief works like a timeline. That the loss recedes behind us at a steady, sensible pace, a little smaller each year, a little further back, until it’s a dot on the horizon. Tidy, linear, and manageable.

But that’s not how it actually works. Not for the big losses. And the big losses aren’t only people. Sometimes it’s a body that used to move through the world one way and now moves through it another. A career that ended before you’d finished with it. A place you had to leave, a life you had to close the door on, a version of yourself you didn’t get to keep. These don’t recede on schedule either. They stay close. The grief doesn’t fade because of what it’s made of. The love, the belonging, the life you thought you’d have. None of it obeys the calendar.

For me, it’s Connor. But whatever it is you carry, I think the same strange mercy might hold. I’ve come to believe something that comforts me, odd as it sounds. What we lose isn’t behind us, receding. Time isn’t a straight line with them shrinking at the far end of it. It loops and folds. The moment I lost the physical Connor and this moment, right now, aren’t as far apart as the calendar insists. Some part of that day is always present. And some part of him is always just ahead, not gone, not behind, but woven into a now that doesn’t run in a straight line.

This week, with everything circling backward, memory refusing to stay put, the past and present tangling, the sky agrees with me. Time is stranger than we’re told. And that strangeness, if you let it, can be a mercy.

The belief that won’t survive this week

“It’s been years. I should be further along by now.”

You won’t be. And you were never meant to be.

We put so much pressure on ourselves to feel the right distance from our losses. As if there’s a correct number of years after which it should stop being close. As if still feeling it means we’ve done grief wrong.

But closeness isn’t a malfunction. The loss stays near because the love stays near. And the love was never going to file itself away on schedule. You don’t get over the people who shaped you. You carry them. Forward, backward, in loops the calendar can’t chart.

So if a date this week, or this month, or this year sits heavier than the “amount of time” says it should, let it. That heaviness is love, keeping its own strange time.

What I do with this week

I hold both doors.

I let the beginning be a beginning. The new home, the life that did, in fact, keep unfolding, the years that held real joy alongside the grief. That part is real.

And I let the ending be present too. It’s not behind me, not resolved, but here, woven into the same July light. I don’t make myself choose. I’ve learned I don’t have to. The day was both. It’s still both. It always will be.

And Connor’s always just ahead of me on the loop, never as far as the calendar claims.

This week, if you’re standing at your own double door with a beginning and an ending you’ve never quite been able to separate, you don’t have to separate them either. Some doors open and close at the same time. Some days hold both. And the love that runs through all of it doesn’t keep linear time.

Neither, it turns out, do we.

Jonni

P.S. If this is a heavy week for you with an anniversary, a date your body knows by heart, or a loss that refuses to keep its distance, you don’t have to carry it in silence. This is so much of what UNLIMITED is for. Someone thinking about you, writing back, walking alongside whatever you’re carrying. Whenever you’re ready. 

P.P.S. The house still holds. So do I. So does he.