Last month I attended the funeral of a woman I admired deeply.
She was 52 years old. She had fought hard and she had done it with a kind of grace that made you want to be better. She didn't wear wigs through her treatment. She just walked into every room exactly as she was, bald and beautiful and completely herself. I remember thinking she was everything I wanted to be in ten years.
I work in death care. I publish a magazine about funeral service. I read about grief and loss and how to walk alongside the bereaved almost every single day. I have edited pieces about the importance of presence, about what families need, about how showing up matters more than saying the right thing.
And I stood in that room full of people who loved her, and I froze.
I did not approach her husband. I did not say what I came to say. I watched him from across the room, surrounded by people who had known her longer and loved her louder than I had, and I told myself he did not need me adding to the crowd. I told myself I had not earned my place in that circle of grief. My loss was smaller. My right to be there was smaller.
So I hid. And eventually I left.
I have thought about that decision several times since.
The Thing Nobody Tells You About Grief
We talk a lot in this industry about what the bereaved need. We talk about presence and compassion and the importance of not saying the wrong thing. What we talk about less is the strange arithmetic people do with their own grief, the quiet way we measure our sadness against everyone else’s and decide ours does not measure up.
I knew her through church. We were not best friends. But she had asked about my health once while she was in the middle of chemo. She was going through something I cannot imagine and she stopped to ask how I was doing. When I told her the thing I had been worried about turned out to be nothing, she smiled and said maybe it was a miracle. That is who she was.
I loved her. Not the way her closest friends did. Not the way her family did. But I loved her. And I did not say so to the man who needed to hear it most that day.
What She Said
Her brother delivered a beautiful message at her funeral. Near the end of her life, just days before she passed, he leaned down close to her and asked if she had any advice for him.
She said: Live. Just live.
I have been turning those three words over ever since. There is something in them that cuts through everything. Not a complicated framework. Not a list of things to do or say or feel. Just that. Live.
I think about what it means to really live, to show up even when you are not sure you belong, to say the thing even when you do not have the perfect words, to walk across the room and give someone a hug and say I loved her, because that is true and it is enough.
I did not do that. I wish I had.
For Anyone Else Who Has Ever Frozen
If you have ever stood at a funeral and talked yourself out of approaching someone because you did not think your grief was big enough, I want to say something to you.
You belonged there. Your love counted. The family did not need you to have known their person the longest or the best. They just needed to know their person was loved by more people than they realized. That is what showing up says. That is the whole message.
You do not need the right words. There are no right words. You just need to cross the room.
This is Death Awareness Month. And what I am most aware of right now is not death itself. It is how much I want to be better at living in the spaces death leaves behind. Better at crossing the room. Better at saying the simple true thing.
She would have been better at it than me. She was better at most things.
Just live.