I posted exactly one photo from a once-in-a-lifetime trip I took last September.

My dear friend whisked me away to Sweden, Stockholm specifically, and we had a fabulous time.

So much about our trip was aesthetic and Scandi and Instagram-worthy.

But the only photo I shared was one on the last full day of our trip, which happened to be my father’s last day on earth.

And while I subjected my husband and girls to a screen-cast slideshow squeezed on our couch when I was back stateside, the photos sat largely untouched for the last year.

Now Ive been known to live in an entirely different timeline in scrap-landia. According to our family scrapbook, it is circa 2012.

But this was somehow different.

Somehow, and largely subconsciously, I’d covered those photos in a layer of guilt.

Guilt at not being by his bedside, guilt at not being there for my mother, guilt at not being there when he breathed his last.

Guilt at enjoying this life-expanding event while an equally heartbreaking one was occurring.

When the one-year anniversary of both came round, I wanted to honor both – but it still felt like throwing celebration in the face of sadness.

When I finally sorted through the hundreds of photos this week, it didn’t occur to me until I discussed it with my therapist the next day, that the process was actually part of grieving my father. I had been thinking of him all that week already. He had been with me in so many spiritual and even metaphysical ways. And while our trip had been planned well before he even fell ill, God had chosen his final time even sooner than that.

I didn’t choose to not be with my father. He would’ve chosen to savor each and every moment with me had I been able to come home and tell them all to him.

In so many synchronistic ways, we sailed together that week.

And what is grief – and life – but beauty and pain together.

Photo Info

17th-century warship Vasa at the Vasa Museum located on the island of Djurgården in Stockholm, Jennifer Butler Basile, September 21, 2025