Lent 2026 · Day 18: The Heart and Life That Continues

For years, people have argued about whether Jack could have fit on that floating door with Rose in the movie Titanic.

Personally, I’m not convinced he could have. Physics aside, the door was already barely holding one freezing person above the water. Two probably would have sunk it. But that debate was never really the part of the movie that stuck with me.

The moment that always stayed with me is when Rose realizes the rescue boats are coming. She understands she might actually survive. And then she has to do something almost unbearable.

She gently pries Jack’s frozen fingers off the door and lets him drift into the dark water below. All the while she promises him, “I’ll never let go. I’ll never let go.”

Which of course sounds like a ridiculous contradiction.

Because she literally lets go.

And yet… she keeps the promise.

Rose survives. She builds a life. She has adventures, loves, children, and memories. She lives the kind of full, complicated life Jack believed she deserved. And at the end of the story, she drops that enormous diamond into the ocean.

People always ask why she did that.

Maybe it belonged with the memory of that moment.

Maybe it was her way of returning something sacred to the past.

Or maybe she just didn’t want treasure hunters and film directors fighting over it.

Who knows.

Jack and Rose aren’t real.

But the truth the story is trying to tell absolutely is.

Life continues.

Even after loss.

Even after grief.

Even after the moment when you realize someone you loved is no longer walking beside you.

A few years ago I was golfing alone on a cold, windy day. The kind of Minnesota day where it’s about forty degrees and the wind is blowing thirty miles an hour. Most reasonable people stay home in that weather.

Minnesotan golfers do not, and apparently neither do I. Sometimes I have no good sense. If you love the game enough, you’ll play until the courses finally shut down for the season.

The course was mostly empty that afternoon. Just the sound of wind and the occasional thud of a golf ball.

Earlier that week I had seen a news story about something called a “wind phone.” Someone had mounted an old rotary phone to a tree so people could call loved ones who had died.

It sounded a little strange.

A little woo woo.

A little mystical.

But also… kind of beautiful.

I didn’t have a rotary phone on that golf course. But standing there alone in the wind, I thought about my friend Robin. Her death anniversary was coming up. This was in November.

I remembered our last conversation. She had asked if I wanted to go with her to see the U.S. Open in New York. It had become a tradition for her.

I told her I couldn’t make it that year. “Maybe next year,” I said.

Of course next year never came for her.

Standing there on that quiet golf course, I found myself talking into the wind.

I told her how much I missed her. I told her I thought we would have had so much fun golfing together. She played tennis in college before a hip injury ended it, but I always thought she would have loved golf too.

We would have had so many ridiculous golf outings.

Bad shots.

Good shots.

Laughing at each other’s terrible putting.

But then another realization hit me.

We will never make new memories together.

That’s the part of grief people don’t talk about enough.

The memories you already have become incredibly precious.

But the future you imagined together quietly disappears.

And my friend Kimi once said something that stuck with me.

“It’s really sad when you look at it that way.”

And it is.

Because grief only exists where love existed first.

You don’t mourn people who didn’t matter.

You mourn the ones who changed you.

Which brings me back to Lent.

Lent is often framed as a season of sacrifice or discipline. But at its heart it is also about learning how to live with loss. The entire Christian story moves toward the cross. Toward grief. Toward the moment when people who loved Jesus believe everything they hoped for has ended.

And yet the story doesn’t end there.

Life continues.

Love continues.

The people we lose never completely disappear from the story of our lives. They become part of the way we move through the world.

Part of the way we love other people.

Part of the courage we carry forward.

Rose let go of Jack’s hand. But she carried the life he believed she could live.

I think grief sometimes works the same way.

We let go.

But we don’t forget.

I don’t have many regrets. But the regrets I do have are the things I didn’t do. The choices and chances I didn’t take.

Tell your friends you love them.

Do the thing.

Go to the U.S. Open.

Because maybe that’s the last adventure you’ll get to have with that person.

Her birthday is in April, and like on that cold November day, I’ll walk a golf course alone and speak into the wind. I’ll have that familiar conversation with Robin. I’ll tell her all the ridiculous stories I have to tell her since we last spoke. I’ll tell her I miss her. I’ll tell her the world is on fire and that my world feels less bright without her.

I wish I had some uplifting thing to say.

I don’t.

Because grief is like that.

It’s about sitting in the sadness and experiencing the loss. Letting go isn’t just about moving on. It’s about accepting what is no longer there.

Lent Reflection:

The apostle Paul writes in Epistle to the Philippians 3:13–14:

“But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal…”

I don’t think Paul meant pretending the past didn’t matter. Paul carried a complicated past with him... loss, mistakes, persecution, and people he loved who were gone. “Forgetting what is behind” was not about erasing those things. It was about refusing to let them anchor him in place.

Grief, love, and memory travel with us. They become part of who we are. But they do not have to stop us from continuing the journey.

Faith, like life, keeps moving forward.

And sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is carry the love of the people we’ve lost and keep living the life they hoped we would have.

Take care of yourselves.

Take care of each other. 💛

#lentreflections2026 #40days40nights #windphone #griefjourney