I can do it with a broken heart.

Thank you Taylor Swift for helping me understand my grief better.

Jul 07, 2024

Whether you love, like, hate, tolerate, or are indifferent to Taylor Swift, her new song "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart" brought me clarity about grief that I have been struggling with for 6 years.

I first listened to Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department album while I was in Colorado. I was there by myself, handling a few things for my aunt and uncle’s estate. They both passed away in 2022, and I have been serving as Executor. Alone in a beautiful mountain town, I thought, why not get super introspective while listening to another super introspective woman? 🤷🏽‍♀️

I was sad, to say the least. I mean, I’ve been super sad, struggling with depression, for a little over 7 years due to compounding loss and grief, but that’s for another post.

Let’s start with losing my dad unexpectedly on July 7, 2018. This was a devastating loss for a lot of people. For me, learning to do life without him is still a struggle and it’s been 6 years.

I knew I was struggling, but I was strong, so I was making it work. I was doing the things, delivering on my commitments, trying my hardest.

But you know how you can hear a lyric to a song and it just explains something you’ve had trouble putting words to? For me, I found an understanding of how I have felt for so long in very succinct phrasing.

Cue “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”…

The song helped me understand my grief and my sadness a little better. It gave me clarity.

I now know for certain, I was doing life with a broken heart. And I did pretty well. But understanding it that simply, “I can do it with a broken heart,” helped me realize I do not want to continue that way.

My dad passed six years ago today. I was two months postpartum with my second child, my daughter. The following months are a blur, if even present in my memory. Eventually, life just resumed, but a massive void was there lingering. Every year my dad’s angelversary has brought a different experience.

Leading up to today, I was starting to feel so mad. Mad because my children will never really know my dad. I am mad that he won’t have any sort of influence on them. I’ll try to carry his memory forward, but it’s not the same. So I am mad. And I am so sad.

Living with grief is not easy; there is no formula to move through it. Grief is just there, and sometimes it’s heavy and sometimes it’s not. A few years go by and you think it’s getting easier, but then 6 years go by and you still feel the weight of it all.

Just because “I can do it with a broken heart,” doesn’t mean I want to. So, it’s time to heal my heart.

How will I do that? Talking about it, to start. Writing about it. So, while this is an incredibly vulnerable thing to do, I am going to give it a shot. My dad was a brave adventurer. I am going to be brave here, through writing, sharing, and learning.