Gold and Grief: A Therapists reflection on the Honoring of Johnny Gaudreau

When Team USA won gold and the arena erupted, it would have been enough. The helmets tossed, the bodies colliding at center ice, the collective exhale of a team that had done what they set out to do.

But then they brought his children onto the ice.

Not tucked away. Not shielded from the intensity of it all. They were folded into it, their small bodies in oversized celebratory energy, held at hip height by men still in full gear, tears mixing with sweat and laughter. The jersey of Johnny Gaudreau wasn’t just lifted; his children were lifted. They were positioned inside the victory, not adjacent to it.

That’s when the moment shifted from triumph to something transcendent.

In early grief theory, largely shaped by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, we were given language for the emotional terrain of loss. Later, alongside David Kessler, a sixth stage was named: meaning.

Meaning is not a silver lining. It is not an explanation. It is not “everything happens for a reason.”

Meaning is continuation.

It asks: Given that this happened, now who will I become?
How will this love keep moving through my life?

This is where Logotherapy enters the conversation. Viktor Frankl, founder of Logotherapy, argued that the primary human drive is not pleasure or power, but meaning. Particularly in suffering. When we cannot change our circumstances, he suggested, we retain freedom in how we respond to them. Meaning is not found in the loss itself. It is created in our orientation toward it.

On that ice, meaning was visible.

It looked like teammates refusing to let their friend’s life collapse into a past tense statistic.
It looked like children being physically incorporated into a communal ritual of victory.
It looked like grown men weeping openly while celebrating not in spite of the grief, but because of the love threaded through it.

That act matters developmentally, communally, existentially.

Those children will grow up with embodied memory: My father was honored. My father mattered. The community did not turn away from us. The story of his life was spoken in joy, not only in sorrow. That is meaning-making in real time.

Watching meaning embodied in that way, many of us felt something visceral.

Why?

Because witnessing meaning-making regulates something deep in us.

Grief threatens coherence. It destabilizes our sense that the world is predictable or fair. When we see loss metabolized (not minimized, not denied, but woven into continued life) our nervous systems may register something close to possibility. We feel, even unconsciously: suffering does not have to annihilate connection. Love does not end at death.

That recognition can bring tears.

It can tighten the throat and warm the chest simultaneously. Pride and ache coexisting. The body responding before the mind fully understands why.

Moments like that stir our own unfinished griefs. They brush up against our private losses, the people we carry quietly, the names we don’t always say out loud. When we see a community speak a name boldly in the middle of joy, something in us softens.

Meaning-making is contagious.

It invites us to ask:
How am I carrying my losses?
Where am I allowing love to continue shaping my life?
What rituals have I created or avoided?

The gold medal was extraordinary.

But the deeper victory was this: they demonstrated that grief and joy are not opposites. They are partners in the ongoing expression of love.

Meaning is not about moving on.
It is about moving forward, with.

And sometimes, it looks like lifting children into the center of a celebration and silently declaring: You are still part of this.