Tangible Ways to Honor a Loved One Through Grief
This reflection connects personal grief and remembrance with love expressed through tangible care. Through stories of loss, comfort from Scripture, and a community’s support, it offers practical ways to honor a loved one’s legacy while taking small steps forward. It also highlights how God’s closeness can be felt through His people.
- Grief often looks for a “place to go,” and tangible reminders can help carry love forward.
- God can make His closeness tangible through the care of a church community.
- Love expressed outwardly can be healing, even while grief remains.
By Anna Griffin
After my father passed away, I found myself holding on to every tangible reminder of him. He had a lifelong passion for restoring classic cars. He loved their beauty, but he loved the process even more. He had a keen eye for details that were forgotten to time and believed they could be brought back to life with enough care. In many ways, this shaped how I learned to see the world and inspired my own love for timeless design. I think of him every time my team and I come up with a vintage-style design that blends the old with the new.
These reminders of my father’s legacy help give my grief a place to go, especially when the emotions feel too heavy to carry all at once. They also give me such gratitude for the years God gave us together, and hope that the love we shared is not lost.
A Story of Love and Loss
I see that same desire to hold onto love in our community, too. Many people first find Anna Griffin, Inc. because they love papercrafting. But over time, I get to hear incredible stories about the inspiration behind the hobby.
Kathleen Manges shared one of those stories with me. I first came to know her as someone with a passion for handmade kindness. It was only later that I learned she was also a mother walking through a devastating loss.
In February 2024, Kathleen lost her teenage son, Vincent, suddenly and unexpectedly. She told me she was blessed to be part of a church where people showed up right away with hot meals and heartfelt notes, many with Bible verses that offered comfort in her time of need. She describes that season as one where God made His closeness tangible through His people. As Psalm 34:18 reminds us, “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted; he rescues those whose spirits are crushed” (New Living Translation). Someone even made her family a grief box where she could store these handmade mementos.
In the weeks that followed, Kathleen joined a grief support group through her church. One of their encouragements was to return to a hobby as a way to take small steps forward. For her, that meant returning to her love of papercrafting and reconnecting with our community. She started by making more than 100 sympathy cards to give to others dealing with similar stories of loss.
I think of Tabitha, also called Dorcas, in Acts 9:36-41, a woman remembered for the clothes she made for widows. Her legacy was one of handmade love, offered freely to meet the needs of her community. Kathleen shared that she sees a similar legacy in her son’s life, too. Before he passed, Vincent was working on a Boy Scouts project that built picnic tables and benches for their church members to enjoy. Now, each week when Kathleen walks into church and sees them, she is reminded of the kind of heart her son had, and how his acts of kindness can still bless others even in the midst of loss.
Tangible Ways to Honor the Life and Legacy of a Loved One
Whether you’re experiencing a season of grief yourself or want to support someone who is, here are a few tangible ways you can honor the life and legacy of a loved one:
- Create a tangible memory. Kathleen told me that, in the months after losing Vincent, she was so grateful to have scrapbooked his life. Those pages were something she could return to when she wanted to feel close to him. While tangible memories can never replace a person, they can help us create a bridge between the past and the present. And it’s never too late to begin. If you’re supporting someone who is grieving, you might be worried about doing the wrong thing. This is one place to get started. Share a photo or a story you love, or a memory you don’t want them to lose. I always appreciate it when the people I love are remembered out loud.
- Choose one legacy thread. My father loved classic cars, and to this day, I take the black 1965 Mustang Convertible he restored and gifted me for my sixteenth birthday out for a drive when the weather is nice. It helps me feel close to him. The same goes for Kathleen, with the picnic tables and benches her son built for their church, which have become a tangible reminder of his presence in their community. Even if you don’t share the same passion as your loved one, you can still look for small threads of connection that keep them close to your heart. It might be a tradition the two of you shared or a place they especially loved to visit.
- Make love visible for someone else. For Kathleen, returning to papercrafting didn’t erase her grief. But it did give her hands something to do, which offered a sense of peace in the middle of tragedy. There’s also something so healing about letting your grief move outward into love. Acts of service are a powerful reminder that we can bring comfort to someone else, even while we are still grieving ourselves. It’s God’s way of comforting us through one another, allowing us to remember our purpose here on Earth, especially when everything feels disrupted.
I describe grief as walking through the valley of the shadow of death, one heavy step at a time, until hints of sunlight begin to break through again. Scripture reminds us that we do not walk our path alone. And love is an action that lets those glimmers of sunlight in, more and more each time.
Anna Griffin, Founder and CEO, Anna Griffin, Inc.
