Grief and America’s 250th Birthday

This Fourth of July weekend, America turns 250 years old. For some people, that feels like a remarkable milestone worth celebrating. For others, it feels much more complicated. For many of us, it's a mix of both.

Grief doesn’t take off for the holidays. Lucky us. 

While everyone else seems to be planning cookouts, road trips, and fireworks, you might be calculating whether you can make it through dinner without crying. You might be setting an extra place in your mind for the person who should still be sitting beside you. You might be making your grandmother's potato salad for the first time without her standing over your shoulder, insisting you're doing it wrong. You might hear fireworks and think about a veteran you love. Holidays can have a way of making absence louder.

Or, maybe your grief has nothing to do with death at all.

Perhaps you're grieving a marriage that ended, a job you thought you'd have forever, a diagnosis that changed everything, or the future you imagined for yourself. Grief hits us anytime life becomes unrecognizable or surprising, even in the most mundane holiday weekend moments when you weren’t expecting it. 

For many Americans this year, though, grief extends beyond their personal lives. 

Some of us are mourning the version of America they’ve always believed in. Others are grieving the country they hoped it could become. Some feel deep uncertainty about their rights, their financial future, their safety, or the opportunities available to the people they love. Others, still, are grieving relationships that have fractured under the weight of political division, watching conversations with neighbors, friends, and family members become increasingly difficult– or downright dangerous.

We often act as though grief belongs only at funerals, but that's never been true. People grieve countries and communities. We grieve institutions they once trusted. We grieve dreams that have slipped away. We grieve identities, expectations, and futures we thought were guaranteed. These losses may not come with sympathy cards or casseroles, but they are losses all the same.

We've also been taught that celebration and grief are opposites—that choosing one means abandoning the other. Real life rarely works that way. We can love our country while mourning parts of what it has become. We can feel grateful for how far we've come while grieving where we've fallen short. We can laugh with our family at a backyard barbecue while wishing someone we miss were there to laugh with us.

Grief doesn't disappear because the calendar says it's a holiday. It doesn't pause because there's a birthday to celebrate, whether it's yours, your child's, or your country's. 

So if this weekend feels heavier than everyone else's social media posts suggest, we promise you’re not actually the only person who feels this way. Perhaps that's the real invitation of America's 250th birthday: not to decide whether we should celebrate or grieve, but to recognize that, like so much of life, we may have to learn how to hold both at the same time.