January has always felt like a strange month. It’s long, gray, and stretched thin like an old rubber band about to snap. People talk about “new beginnings,” resolutions, fresh starts. But for some of us, January is not a clean slate. It’s a ledger of losses.

I’ve lost so many people in January including family, loved ones, dear friends, beloved pets whose absence still aches in the quiet corners of the house. January feels like a hallway lined with ghosts, each door holding a memory I’m both afraid and compelled to open. And today, this day, right in the middle of the month, is one of the hardest. The kind of day that once cracked my family in half and reshaped us in ways we never asked for.

There’s a quote that says, “Grief never gets smaller; we get bigger around it.” And I believe that. Grief doesn’t shrink. It doesn’t evaporate or fade into a gentle watercolor. It stays sharp, like glass you learn to step around but still occasionally slice your foot on. What changes is us. We expand, stretch, grow new layers, develop new muscles we never wanted to train.

We become sturdier out of necessity, not choice.

Today I remind myself that surviving is not the same as forgetting. Survival means we carry the love forward, even when the loss feels heavy. It means we learn to keep going, even if we do it with a limp. It means we honor those who are gone by still finding pockets of joy, still laughing at absurdities, still allowing ourselves to be fully alive.

January may always be the month I dread for it is too long, too quiet, too full of ghosts. But it’s also proof of endurance. Proof I have grown big enough to hold the grief without breaking. Proof that even in the starkest part of winter, the heart somehow continues beating.

We survive. We keep surviving. And in that survival, there is love that is deep, stubborn, refusing to let go.