Tag: love
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The Things With Nowhere to Go
Note: This piece grew out of the conversation that followed when I first shared my thoughts about the things we keep after loss. So many people wrote with their own stories, and each one carried the same quiet ache — the longing for continuity, the wish that our love could keep unfolding through the hands…
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Teach Your Community How to Remember With You
People often want to reach out when someone dies. They really do. But most of the time, they don’t know how. They don’t know what’s safe to say or if it will make you cry or if you’d rather not talk about it at all. So they wait. Or they stay quiet. And that silence…
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Moving Into the Second Year Without Jess
I am moving into the second year without Jess, and grief feels different now. I suppose the shock has worn off. There is no longer that moment of sudden disbelief that she is gone. Instead, there’s a steady, familiar ache. I am no longer surprised by her absence. I am simply, regularly saddened by it.…
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The Ache of Forgetting
This sweatshirt caught me off guard. I loved it instantly: a frog with a sword, wearing a cape, shouting Huzzah! But what undid me was what came after. Memory. I had forgotten that Jess loved the word Huzzah. In the months before she died, she used it constantly, tossing it into texts, jokes, and silly…
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Love After Loss: Kafka, a Mother, and the Grief Heart
There’s a story people often tell about Franz Kafka. It didn’t come from one of his famous books, but from something he did in real life. He came across a little girl who was heartbroken because she had lost her doll. Most adults might have tried to cheer her up or tell her she’d be…
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Then She Was Gone
I sat down to share a few thoughts and began searching for a photo, unsure if anything would be right. Then I found this previously unnoticed one, so fitting it felt almost prophetic. Leave it to Jess. If this little essay had a title, it might be “Then She Was Gone.” It’s been eleven months…
Grief Heart Project 