Today, I miss too many souls.
Grief feels heavy. Grief needs a place to go.
"Grief, I've learned, is really just love. It's all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go."
- Jamie Anderson
—
This morning, I attended a virtual workshop through OnSite titled “How do I do this? A conversation around grief and loss.
The timing of this webinar wasn’t accidental.
March 11th is heavy. It will forever and always be heavy.
I felt it in my bones last night when I couldn’t fall asleep. I felt in my heart when I got up to get my daughter dressed for preschool. I felt it in my soul when I went back to sleep. When I got up, again, took a shower, and sat down at my computer.
Today, my sweet friend Jordan should be turning 36.
Happy Birthday in Heaven, sweetest friend of mine.
Today, I think of the best times we had together. The birthdays and the Relays and the sleepovers and the FaceTime dates, your trips to Chicago and the cards and the quotes and the dammit dolls and your smile. I think about our Skype shopping dates, the silver sparkle TOMS and the Des Moines, Hell Yes shirt - the parts of us that overlapped. I think about the decade of love and laughter and memories and celebrations we were lucky enough to share, and I feel a quiet gratitude for the part of life we got to live together.
I also miss you with my whole heart sweet girl. I weep for you today.
The timing of your birthday this year, this season, it makes missing you sting a little bit more, and in truth I’ll always be angry at the way your life on earth was cut short when it could’ve been prevented, but I also know you’d still ask me to choose to celebrate. To eat a cupcake and to do a Random Act of Kindness and to just take one extra minute to exhale.
Seven and a half years ago (how on earth has it been this long, sweet friend?) Jordan’s tragic passing turned my world upside down, and broke my heart in ways I didn’t know were possible. The wound stung particularly deep again on the two year anniversary of her death, which was just one day after our pregnancy with Brooklyn was confirmed. She would’ve been the first person I called after leaving the ultrasound room - and instead I had to look up to the sky and hope she was looking down on us.
The following March, on Jordan’s 3rd birthday in heaven, her absence felt so palpable. We were approximately 12 weeks away from welcoming Brooklyn into the world, and it hit me like a ton of bricks when I realized this would be a world where my daughter will only get to hear stories about her Auntie Jordan, rather than be held and loved by her.
Today, this makes me feel so so sad. Last year, on Jordan’s 7th birthday in heaven, we experienced something heavier - saying another goodbye to a friend we never should’ve had to lose. [Continued below]
The world still needs hearts like yours.
I’ll love you for always, JB.
—
A year ago this week, Rick and I took a last minute trip to Florida.
This trip was not a vacation.
In fact, this trip was a trip we desperately did not want to take.
We made this trip to say a goodbye, just incase time runs out. We had no idea in the moments we sat with our beautiful friend Amanda that she would only live for 23 more days. We got in our trip just under the wire. We never could’ve known that, but the universe did. And for that, my heart breaks in gratitude and in grief.
We made this trip to see a friend who had been relentlessly been fighting for her life.
When she was diagnosed with Stage 4 Metastatic Breast Cancer in December 2018, we became the hopeful. We became part of the tribe that lifted her up in any way possible.
We also became part of the honest, brutal, heartbreaking conversations.
Over the four years she lived with MBC, I asked so often if we still had time. I tried to go and visit to make memories in August of 2021, and I left urgently and immediately in what we know now was extremely preterm labor with the twins. I left Florida not knowing if my babies or my friend were going to live.
Today, Noah and Victoria are in heaven, and Amanda is too. It’s hauntingly terrifying, to be honest, to know that they met this way, that they found each other here, in the place past earth, in a time that was way way too fucking soon for all of them.
So last year, we did the thing. We got on the plane and we showed up. We said as many things as we could. We asked really hard questions - like how can we support your boys after you’re gone, and how can we celebrate your life, and what do you want us to know, and do you know how profoundly you’ve changed our lives?
There were other parts of that trip that both filled and emptied me, that I felt in the depths of my soul, but I’ll never forget March 11 of last year. I sat in the airport preparing to fly home, eyes flooding with tears, with the finality of that trip deep seeded and painful in a way I know nothing can fix.
Love you forever and ever and ever Manda.
You’ll live in my heart forever
Today the heaviness feels real. It’s Amanda, it’s Noah and Victoria, it’s Jordan; It’s Todd and Jennifer and Brett and Lauren and Cal. It’s my grandmother. It’s too many caskets and urns. It’s time passing, and the people we love missing. Today I grasp at the photos and the moments and the memories, and I think about who each of you would’ve been if you were still here, healthy and alive.
I feel devastated. I feel lonely. I feel a thick fog of sadness.
Today I resonate most with this: grief is just love with no place to go.