Grief changes you in ways you don’t expect. It has a way of sneaking into every corner of your life, rearranging the familiar, and leaving you standing in a place that somehow feels both heartbreakingly empty and strangely sacred.
In this week’s Outnumbered by Chaos podcast episode, I had the privilege of sitting down with Michelle Rigden, a woman whose story is filled with both heartbreaking loss and breathtaking beauty. Michelle’s journey reminded me that even in the midst of sorrow, even when your life is split into a distinct “before” and “after,” there is still joy to be found if you are willing to keep your heart open to it.
A Love Story Interrupted, But Never Ended
Michelle met her husband, Gareth, when they were just twenty years old — full of dreams, plans, and the kind of hope that makes you believe you have forever stretched out ahead of you. Over the next thirty-one years, they built a life full of love, laughter, and family. They raised two children, weathered the storms that marriage inevitably brings, and found themselves entering a season where life was beginning to slow down just enough for them to rediscover each other.
They were stepping into a new chapter — one where weekends away and quiet dinners weren’t a rare treat, but a beautiful new normal — when life, as it so often does, shifted without warning. After a few days of strange symptoms and a trip to the hospital, Gareth was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer. There were no treatment options. No hopeful timelines. Just the sudden, shattering reality that time — the one thing they had always assumed they had more of — was now painfully, heartbreakingly short.
Choosing Joy in the Shadow of Loss
Michelle shared how, from the very beginning, they made an intentional choice not to spend what little time they had left focusing on death, but to pour everything they had into living. They knew they couldn’t change the ending, but they could change the story they told in those final chapters.
Instead of drowning in grief, they clung to gratitude.
Instead of fixating on what was slipping away, they celebrated what was still here, right now, in front of them.
Michelle talked about how that shift in mindset — that decision to live fully, even as death loomed closer each day — became their anchor. It didn’t erase the pain or the fear, but it created space for laughter, for love, and for memories that would carry Michelle and her children through the hard days that were still to come.
A Goodbye That Felt Like a Celebration
When Gareth’s final day arrived, it didn’t look the way many might imagine it would.
There was no heavy, suffocating sadness in the room.
Instead, there was music.
There was laughter.
There was a house filled with the people who loved him most.
After Gareth took his last breath, Michelle, her daughter, and her son didn’t retreat into the shadows of grief. Instead, they opened a bottle of champagne — the same one Gareth had been saving for Christmas — and they toasted to the life they had shared. They played Gareth’s favorite songs loud enough to fill every corner of the house. They told stories, they laughed until they cried, and they honored him the way he would have wanted: not by mourning the loss, but by celebrating the love.
Michelle told me that even now, when she looks back on that night, she doesn’t feel regret. She feels pride. Pride that they were able to give Gareth the kind of farewell that felt honest, joyful, and full of the very love that had defined their life together.
Grief Changes You, But It Doesn’t End You
In the months that followed, Michelle continued to choose gratitude over despair. She didn’t pretend that grief wasn’t there — she simply refused to let it be the only thing in the room. She allowed herself to cry when she needed to, but she also gave herself permission to laugh, to dream, and to begin imagining a future that, while different than she had once planned, could still be beautiful.
Michelle’s life today doesn’t look exactly like the one she shared with Gareth, and she’s intentional about that. She didn’t want to simply live the same life, just with an empty seat at the table. She wanted to create something new — something that honored Gareth’s memory without being trapped by it.
She’s embraced new friendships, new adventures, and even a new love — not as a replacement, but as an expansion of the love her heart had already learned to hold. Because love, as Michelle so beautifully reminded me, doesn’t run out. If anything, it grows wider and deeper the more we choose to give it away.
Michelle’s Advice for Anyone Walking Through Grief
As we talked, Michelle shared some of the hard-earned wisdom she has gathered along the way. For anyone who finds themselves stumbling through those early days of loss, she offers this advice:
- Slow down. Your mind will want to race ahead into the future, imagining every terrible possibility, but grief is a journey that can only be taken one moment at a time.
- Be endlessly kind to yourself. Allow yourself to feel every emotion without judgment. Grief has no timeline and no rules.
- Trust that joy will return. It may come in small, almost unnoticeable ways at first, but if you stay open, it will grow.
- Live in the now. Don’t borrow pain from a future that hasn’t happened yet. Healing happens here, in today.
Michelle reminded me — and I hope reminds you — that healing doesn’t mean forgetting. It means learning how to carry the love and the loss together, side by side, without losing yourself in either one.
Where to Find Michelle
If you connected with Michelle’s story — and honestly, how could you not? — you can find her at MichelleRigden.com. She’s building a beautiful community called the Band of Joy Seekers, where she shares weekly encouragement for anyone learning to live with grief, gratitude, and hope all tangled together.
(And yes — she’s every bit as genuine and kind in her writing as she was in our conversation.)
Friend, if you’re standing in the messy middle of your own grief right now, please hear this: you are not broken beyond repair. You are simply being stretched into a heart big enough to hold both sorrow and joy.
There is life ahead of you.
There is still beauty waiting to be found.
And you, just as you are, are so incredibly worthy of every bit of it.
