How to Balance Grief and Joy Without Feeling Guilty

There’s a quiet ache that follows moments of happiness after you’ve lost someone you love.

You might find yourself laughing at a dinner table and, in a breath’s time, feel the sting of guilt. You’re mid-dance at a wedding, smiling so hard it hurts, when their favorite song plays and suddenly your chest caves in. That beautiful sunset you once shared with them now feels both like a gift and a betrayal.

How can joy exist in a world where they no longer do?

This is the sacred tension that lives inside so many hearts—a longing for joy, tainted by the fear of forgetting, of moving on, of living too fully.

The Story of Diane and the Yellow Balloons

Diane was a woman who believed in celebrating life. She threw the kind of birthdays parties where even the cake seemed to smile. But everything changed when her seven-year-old daughter, Ava, passed away after a year-long battle with leukemia.

In the silence that followed Ava’s last breath, the world lost color. Birthdays became days of dread. Laughter felt foreign. The thought of celebrating anything at all? Unbearable.

The first year, Diane kept the curtains drawn on Ava’s birthday. She curled up with Ava’s drawings—crayon portraits of the two of them with big hearts and yellow balloons floating above their heads. Ava loved yellow. Said it made her “feel like the sun was hugging her.”

That year, there were no hugs. No cake. No candles. Only the painful echo of what used to be.

The second year arrived, and Diane’s friends gently urged her to mark the day. “Just dinner,” they said. “Just us.” Diane agreed, not out of hope, but exhaustion. She baked Ava’s favorite vanilla cake with rainbow sprinkles, though she couldn’t bring herself to eat it.

In the corner of the room floated a single yellow balloon. Cherry, her best friend, had brought it. “Just one,” she whispered. “For Ava.”

It hovered silently in the corner, catching light as if Ava had whispered life into it.

That balloon stayed in Diane’s home for days. And each time she looked at it, it reminded her: grief is not the absence of love—it is proof of it. And joy, if allowed, can be a way back to that love.

By the third year, something had shifted. Diane found herself wanting more than the quiet ache of missing Ava. She wanted to feel her daughter’s spirit not just in the shadows, but in the light.

So she did something unexpected: she threw a party.

It wasn’t a birthday party for Ava, not exactly. It was a celebration of love, resilience, and the people who had held Diane together in her darkest hours. Yellow balloons floated from every corner. Ava’s drawings were hung like gallery pieces. Children ran barefoot through her backyard, laughter spilling into the sky.

When the guilt tried to creep in, Diane looked up at the balloons and whispered, You are still with me. And I love you enough to live again.

Balancing Grief and Joy Isn’t Betrayal—It’s Bravery

Diane’s story teaches us something profoundly human:  You don’t have to choose between grief and joy. You can hold them both.

Grief will always be part of your story. It reshapes you, stays with you, softens you in places you didn’t know existed. But it does not cancel out your right to feel joy. In fact, joy can be one of the most sacred ways we honor the ones we’ve lost.

Let’s explore the dialogue that often plays out between grief and healing:

When Grief Speaks, Let Healing Respond

And maybe that’s the point: we don’t stop grieving because the world tells us to. We begin balancing grief with joy because our hearts demand it. We need both. We were built for both.

How to Practice the Balance in Your Own Life

Learning to live again after loss doesn’t come with a manual. But we can take cues from stories like Diane’s. We can create space for both pain and peace, for memories and movement.

Here are some gentle ways you can begin honoring both your grief and your capacity for joy:

Practical Ways to Weave Joy into Grief

You Are Allowed to Laugh Again

Here’s what I want you to remember, whether you’ve lost someone yesterday or decades ago:

You don’t dishonor their memory by smiling.
You don’t erase the pain by celebrating.
And you don’t lose them by choosing to live fully.

You honor them with every breath you take that is filled with love, laughter, and light.

Like Diane, you can let a yellow balloon float beside you—neither erasing grief nor denying joy—but letting both be sacred, side by side.