December 2025 President’s Choice Award Winner 🏆
Honoring Michael Reed — A Voice for Those Learning to Hold Joy Again
There are stories that change us, not because they offer easy answers, but because they tell the truth with courage. Michael Reed’s story is one of those stories.
In November 2016, Michael lost his wife and two daughters on the same day—an unimaginable loss that no words can fully hold. Yet from the deepest places of sorrow, Michael chose not silence, but honesty. Through his book, The Million Stages of Grief, he gives voice to something many grieving hearts feel but rarely say aloud: the guilt of feeling joy.
As someone who has lost my entire immediate family—my parents, siblings, and loved ones—I understand this struggle intimately. The world expects grief to look one way, and healing another. But Michael reminds us that grief does not move in straight lines, and healing does not mean forgetting. Joy does not cancel love. It coexists with it.
In his reflections, Michael speaks openly about sitting in therapy, overwhelmed by tears without fully knowing why—until he realizes the truth: “I feel guilty that 2025 has been a good year. I’m not allowed to have good years anymore.” That sentence alone has resonated with countless readers around the world. It captures the silent conflict so many grieving souls carry—the belief that happiness somehow betrays those we have lost.
But Michael gently dismantles that lie.
Through lived experience and deep emotional insight, he shows us that grief and happiness are not enemies. You can ache for what is gone and still smile at what remains. You can carry sorrow and still feel gratitude. You can miss them fiercely and still allow moments of peace to enter your life. That tug-of-war does not mean you are failing at grief—it means you are human.
What makes Michael’s work so powerful is not that it avoids pain, but that it sits with it honestly. He reminds us that happiness during grief is often quieter, softer, and bittersweet. It’s the smile that comes with tears close behind. It’s feeling alive again and immediately noticing who is missing. And yet—those moments matter. They are signs of resilience. Of love continuing in a new form.
Michael’s book has helped people across the world feel seen, understood, and less alone. It has helped others—and himself—return to the written word as a place of refuge when the weight becomes too heavy. His story does not rush healing or place timelines on pain. Instead, it offers permission: permission to feel, permission to remember, and permission to live.
That is why Michael Reed is our December 2025 President’s Choice Award Winner.
This honor is reserved for voices that embody the heart of the Prestigious International Hope Book Awards—stories that transform pain into purpose and give hope without denying grief. Michael’s work does exactly that. He teaches us that joy is not something we must earn after loss, nor something we should fear. It is something we are allowed to welcome, even while we grieve.
If this holiday season finds you holding sadness in one hand and joy in the other, know this: both belong. Both are valid. Both can live in the same heart.
Michael’s Christmas wish—one we now share—is simple yet profound: that those who are hurting may find peace, even if only for a second. And that when joy appears, we do not push it away, but cherish it, embrace it, and allow ourselves to feel alive again.
Congratulations, Michael Reed. Your courage, honesty, and compassion continue to light the way for so many.
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