Text to My Girlfriends

It felt like a deep sigh, and like your friend reaching across the table to hold your hand. Really, she’s helping you hold your grief for a moment. I have a dear friend here, in St. Louis, who I have gone on long long walks with these past few years, and we have held each other’s grief often. Anxiety, loss, covid, the deaths we have been shaped by, it’s all safe on the table with Courtney. And as happens in the best friendships, we knew we needed balance and we needed beauty and we needed to be taken out of time a bit- and we knew we’d have to create that joy ourselves.  So, we gave ourselves permission to follow every one of our whims and ended up hosting an eight-course extravaganza for our friends at the beginning of December. It was, to be honest, ridiculous! But it came together in many tiny details and moments, and it’s now this perfect glowing memory. One of my favorite courses ended up being the roasted artichokes that were absolutely bathed in garlic butter. I got to teach...

 TW: Please be advised that this post covers parental and pregnancy loss.  My closest friends and I have this understanding that we touch base and check in especially when something is amiss. They haven’t replied in a while, socials have gone dark, or we just know it’s been a rough patch, we do a wellness check. The holidays warrant a check-in for many of us (especially since many of us are in a situation-ship with Grief).  Grief seeps into everything. Even the things you wouldn’t consider to be grief. Yebba’s Evergreen (honestly anything Yebba makes) points me to my mother. How I interact with my sister, my friends, the adventures I take, all of it, I either think of her or the reality of loss dictates the urgency of my choices. I have lost enough and capturing the moment is my driving force.  Loss is a weird thing, mostly because you don’t really have a frame of reference for it. But Loss has also been an invitation into a taboo club - The Grief Gang. No one really...