Grief has a way of appearing in the smallest moments.
Not always in the dramatic ones. Not always in the anniversaries or the days we expect to hurt. Instead, it slips quietly into ordinary life – while driving somewhere familiar, hearing a song on the radio, or when something funny happens and your first instinct is to reach for your phone.
And then you remember.
Last year, within six months of each other, two of my dear friends left this world. Even now, it still feels surreal to say that out loud. There are moments when my brain simply refuses to accept it, as if at any moment they’ll pop back into the rhythm of everyday life where they’ve always belonged.
So often something will happen – a piece of news, a ridiculous story, a good book, a beautiful song, a small victory, a bad day – and they are two of the first people I would have called.
I still feel the impulse sometimes. The automatic reach toward the phone. The thought forming before reality catches up.
And then, there’s that quiet pause where I remember they’re not here to answer.
Songs have become time machines. A few notes of the right one can transport me instantly – back to a car ride (specifically the Teen Challenge van), a laugh that went on too long at a completely inappropriate time, a conversation that felt important even though at the time it seemed ordinary. Music has a way of carrying people with it, and sometimes it feels like pieces of them are still moving through the world that way.
I hear those songs and for a moment it’s like they’re nearby again.
Losing them has shown me something I never fully understood before, but has been a long lesson in the making – in fact it’s where this blog was born from: grief isn’t just pain. It’s also evidence of love.
The depth of missing someone is proof of how deeply they were woven into your life. Every moment I wish I could tell them something, every story I wish they could hear, every time I laugh and instinctively think they would love this – those moments are the shape their friendship left behind.
Grief is the shadow of love that doesn’t have a place to land anymore.
And strangely, there’s beauty in that.
There’s beauty in realizing how rare it is to find people who become part of the way you experience the world. The kind of friends who would have been on the other end of every phone call, who would have understood the story before you even finished telling it, who somehow made life feel bigger simply by being in it.
Life feels even more fleeting than it did before.
It’s fragile. Temporary. Precious in a way we often don’t realize until we’re forced to I think about all the things I wish I could still tell them – updates about life, small daily observations, things that would only be funny to them.
Sometimes I still say those things out loud, half joking, half hoping the universe carries the message somewhere.
Because love doesn’t really disappear. It just changes form.
It lives in songs.
It lives in memories.
In the quiet instinct to share something with someone who shaped your life.
And maybe that’s one of the strange gifts grief gives us – it keeps the people we love woven into the way we move through the world.
So when a song plays and I think of them, or when something happens and my first thought is to call them, I try not to push the feeling away.
Instead, I let it stay for a moment.
Because missing them means they mattered.
And what a beautiful thing it is to have had friendships that still echo this loudly, even after they’re gone.
The Fragrance of my Mother 