I didn’t expect grief to show up like this.
Not in my sleep. Not in the form of warplanes.
But that’s exactly how it came.
We were at some kind of outdoor event—my family and I—when the sky suddenly roared to life. World War II fighters buzzed overhead, circling like vultures. At first, we just watched. Then the gunfire started.
Panic broke out. My dad calmly suggested we get out of there, so we did—walking quickly, trying to escape the madness. I had the strange thought that maybe we could just blend in, fade into the scenery, and avoid detection. Maybe if we didn’t make ourselves known, the chaos would pass us by.
It didn’t.
Soldiers suddenly appeared in the crowd. They weren’t just threatening; they were searching. And when they found us, they grabbed my dad and dragged him away.
That’s when I woke up.
Heart pounding. Eyes wide. Confused… and heavy.
I didn’t understand it at first. Why that imagery? Why war? Why my dad?
But then I remembered what I had spent the past week doing: sorting through my grandmother’s belongings.
She had just passed, and now I was holding pieces of her life in my hands. Books, letters, pictures. The kinds of things that feel sacred one moment and suffocating the next. Because it’s not just stuff—it’s memory. It’s legacy. It’s a mirror held up to your own mortality.
That dream wasn’t just chaos—it was grief, showing up with guns blazing.
Trying to fade into the background? That was me, subconsciously hoping I could sidestep the emotional fallout. But grief has a way of pulling you out of hiding. It forces you to feel. To face the things you’ve neatly packed away.
The soldiers dragging my dad? Maybe that was my brain’s way of revealing what I fear most—that the people who once seemed invincible… aren’t. That the responsibility of carrying forward a legacy is shifting from their shoulders to mine.
And that’s the part no one prepares you for.
No one talks about the silent weight of inheritance—not just the physical objects, but the emotional ones too. The pressure of what to do with someone’s life after they’re gone. What to keep. What to let go. What to live up to. What to become.
I’m still working through it. Still figuring out how to hold space for both sorrow and gratitude. Still learning how to honor the past without being trapped by it.
But that dream—strange as it was—left me with a clear takeaway:
We don’t get to camouflage our way through loss.
Grief is loud. Legacy is heavy. But both are sacred invitations.
To feel. To reflect. To decide what we carry forward.
Maybe you’ve been there too—sorting through boxes, memories, or emotions you didn’t ask for. If so, let me ask you this:
What are you holding onto—not just in your hands, but in your heart?
And what part of someone else’s legacy do you actually want to carry forward?
You don’t have to have all the answers. But the asking—that’s where the healing begins.
