Health & Wellness

You Don’t Need to Pick Between Joy and Grief—Sami Spalter’s Guide to Living While Mourning

September 7, 2025

You Don't Need to Pick Between Joy and Grief—Sami Spalter's Guide to Celebrating Life While Mourning — Image: Pixabay/Pexels.com

Life’s milestones don’t wait for grief to subside. You can be curating a party playlist, blowing out birthday candles, or walking across a graduation stage with joy on the surface but an ache in your heart for the person who isn’t there. It can be disorienting to hold so much joy and so much pain in the same moment. You wonder if it’s even allowed to laugh when your heart feels broken, or if smiling makes it seem like the loss never happened.

On Transform, cohost Sami Spalter says you don’t have to choose one emotion over the other. She planned her wedding while grieving her mom, and she’s the first to admit it was messy, complicated, and deeply human. What got her through were practices that let her honor her grief while still living her life.

How to Celebrate Big Moments While Grieving

Name the duality

The first shift is giving yourself permission to stop picking sides. Culture loves to force emotions into neat boxes, but grief doesn’t work that way. Studies even show that letting yourself feel moments of joy during loss actually helps you adjust better and lean on support more. It’s not denial. It’s not disrespect. It’s just part of being human. “Grief and celebration feel like these two opposites that shouldn’t belong together, but in life, so many of us get handed both of them at the exact same time,” Spalter says. “You do not need to pick between joy and grief.”

This isn’t about pretending everything’s fine or forcing yourself to smile through tears. It’s about making space for all of it. You can miss someone so badly your chest physically aches and still laugh when your cousin’s speech goes completely off the rails. You can cry ugly tears during the vows and still end up barefoot on the dance floor screaming to Beyoncé at midnight. Both are real, both are valid, and both deserve space. Once you stop policing yourself, you stop wasting energy feeling guilty for the happy parts. The grief is still there, but it doesn’t have to consume every single moment.

Create a presence plan

After you accept that both feelings can sit at the same table, the next step is figuring out how to bring your person into the celebration. Grief research calls this “continuing bonds”—maintaining connection in new ways after someone is gone. It’s not only common, it’s healthy. The key is deciding ahead of time what that looks like for you. “We printed one of my favorite photos of my mom from her wedding day in her purple dress, and we placed it on the first chair in the first row of my side of the aisle, and we covered her entire chair in her favorite flower, which was the purple sterling rose,” Spalter recalls.

Having a plan means you’re not caught off guard by their absence. You’ve already carved out a space where they belong. That can be as simple as setting their photo as your phone background for the day, weaving their go-to playlist into cocktail hour, or even slipping their favorite snack into the getting-ready spread. Those anchors don’t erase the loss, but they turn the day into a place where you feel connected instead of alone.

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Let joy in when it shows up

This part is brutal, but it matters. When joy sneaks in—and it will—don’t push it away. Research shows that letting yourself laugh, dance, or smile during grief actually lowers distress and helps you feel closer to the people around you. Spalter’s dad gave her the reminder she needed with four words: life is for the living. As she puts it, “This quote doesn’t mean that we bypass our grief. It means that we carry it with us, but into the light, and we learn how to hold our sadness and our joy in the same hand.”

That shift changed everything. “I am so proud of myself because I had the most amazing wedding weekend. I was so present. I was so contagiously joyous. And I think that that’s something that everyone else matched the energy of.” Instead of people tiptoeing around her grief, her willingness to embrace joy gave everyone else permission to do the same.

Joy won’t show up all day, every day. But when it does, let it in. Take the shot. Sing too loud. Hug too long. Your person would want you to have a life full of moments that make you light up—even if they can’t be there to see it.

For more on moving forward through loss, listen to Transform with Sami Spalter, streaming now.