Morning by Morning, Mourning by Mourning — Carol McLeod Ministries
There are some things they don't teach you in school or church. Like how to be a person—how to be a daughter—on the first morning you wake up in a world without your dad.
Dad died early in the evening, exactly as the sun was setting over the lake outside his bedroom window. My hand was on his chest, and I could feel his heart—his old heart, his good heart—drumming lightly, haltingly through his T-shirt. I kept my palm pressed gently on his chest to find evidence of what little life lingered in him. I caught myself, at once, willing Dad to go and begging God to let him stay a bit longer. But his heart did what a heart does at the end of a good, long life: it slowed and slowed, the way a ticking metronome slackens when you turn down the dial little by little.
"Hi Dad. We're right here," I whispered hoarsely in his ear. That's another thing they don't teach you—what to say to someone you love when they are slipping away to a place you can't see.
And then, after eighty-four years of living on this earth, Dad's heart beat its very last. He was gone.
I looked at Dad. I looked at Mom. I looked at the clock. The sun went down on Dad's earthly life at 7:44 p.m. One minute later, the sun outside his bedroom window slipped under the horizon.
"God called the light 'day,' and the darkness he called 'night.' And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day." (Genesis 1:5)
The sun fell that night and rose the next day—morning light scattering the darkness in the precise way God spoke it all into existence. I woke up to a world that was altogether different and yet the same.
It happens like that some mornings, doesn't it?
Day's first light leaks through your curtains, and your eyes pop open to a new day. Once you move past the fog of waking up, you feel a pit in your stomach.
It's the kind of morning dread you might have felt after your own loss—of a person, a pet, a dream, a job, a freedom, a friendship, your ambition, a decent night's sleep, or the good health you once took for granted.
And let's face it, it's not always the capital-B Bad things that make you pull the covers back over your head. Some mornings you're simply dealing with a low-grade malaise and lack of motivation. Or maybe you anticipate the bad news that has been pinging in your phone notifications. Perhaps you've woken up to a wild rumpus of noisy little people demanding your help on the other side of your bedroom door.
Equally hard? Waking up when the people you've loved fiercely aren't waiting on the other side of the door anymore.
On a morning like that, some bit of dread rides on the morning's happy sunbeams.
And surely we've all had strings of mornings when the alarm blared far too early after a restless night of tossing and turning. The sun has risen, but enthusiasm for the day has definitely not.
I've woken up feeling all of those things.
After Dad died, mornings felt like an alarm set by a broken heart. Every morning, my mind kept walking me back to a hard truth:
You are now a daughter living without a dad.
I realize there's nothing "tragic" about an eighty-four-year-old man who lived a long, good life graduating to heaven. Some of you reading these words have woken to far more devastating losses than I have; this I know.
Even so, loss is loss. Grief is grief. Pain doesn't plot neatly on a measuring stick, and any kind of sorrow can make a morning pretty rough.
For me, losing my dad was my first real experience with grief at such a deep level. His absence was palpable, morning by morning.
And mourning by mourning.
This is the circle of life, so they say. There are beginnings and endings, mornings and evenings, births and deaths. All of time arcs, carrying us in its rhythmic orbit—sun up and sun down.
This shouldn't be a surprise.
From the birthing of light and land, God designed the world to exist in a cycle—a spinning earth with a continuous rhythm of evening and morning. The moon wanes then waxes. The earth passes through seasons. Tides roll in and roll out again. The sky lights up and goes dark once more. Round and round it goes.
Sin crept into that idyllic cycle, bringing new and devastating cycles that include death, heartbreak, and unbearable mornings.
"To everything there is a season." (Ecclesiastes 3:1)
Though not every season brings us everything we want, mornings seem to be both intoxicating in their beauty and sobering in their ability to wrench your heart—sometimes all in one day.
A Do-Over, Every Single Day
Amid the reality of awful mornings, let's not miss this: A morning can become a sweet time to mark new beginnings when you believe afresh that God's mercies are new, as sure as the sun rises.
Mornings are a series of little births, little resurrections. Every spin of Earth's axis is another Genesis, tinted with hope. There's nothing more beautiful than the eastern horizon just before the sun crests above that mesmerizing line of land.
When faced with the brevity of life, will we squander these precious little births born at daybreak? What if morning could become something to savor, even on the most ordinary day? Is it possible to look forward to waking up to life—to love each morning as an unrepeatable gift to unwrap? Dare we hope with expectation that our mornings ahead won't simply be bearable, but beautiful?
After Dad passed away, mornings came and went. Seasons changed. Leaves dropped. Snow fell. Spring bloomed. Summer blazed.
And in those months, I found comfort in the way God gave us this cyclical world with hope built into the fabric of it:
"Weeping may last through the night, but joy comes with the morning." (Psalm 30:5)
Morning by morning, a simple yet foundational truth began to dawn on me:
As long as we are alive, God gives us new mornings every day.
New do-overs every day.
New chances to move forward every day.
New opportunities to make reparations, to seek restoration, to rebuild what was broken.
Every single day.
Editor's Note: This excerpt is from How to Love Your Mornings by Jennifer Dukes Lee (Bethany House Publishers, 2026). Used by permission.
