Grief Lives in Soft Places
How grief lingers not just in pain, but in tenderness
a song that always hits me directly in the soul
Every May, the grief comes back. Not as a tidal wave, but like a soft, familiar ache I’ve learned to live beside. May is the month Kim left us, the month cancer won and we lost the brightest light. Every year around this time, I find myself reaching for her—her voice, her laugh, her presence that could steady me when nothing else could.
Kim was my friend. We met in grad school, part of a little constellation of women I affectionately dubbed the “Golden Girls” of our cohort. She was a therapist, a mother, a wife. A friend who could disarm you with humor one minute and hold your pain the next. She had a gift for saying exactly what you didn’t know you needed to hear—especially when you were drowning and insisting you were “fine.”
She showed up for me when I was deep in postpartum, the kind of deep where time bends and isolation hums beneath everything. She held my babies and, more importantly, she held me. She got me out of the house. She knew the difference between “I’m okay” and I am unraveling. She was my life raft; my safe space.
In one of our last phone calls, I promised her I would visit once she was better. She knew then that “better” was synonymous with “gone,” yet Kim met me exactly where I was, somewhere between hope and denial. I’ll always be grateful to her for giving me that compassion and care amid her grief.
I miss her laugh. Her absurdly long voicemails that would start with “Okay so here’s the thing…” and spiral into hilarious updates and sincere check-ins. I miss the way she loved—with abandon and unapologetically. She was radiant. She was real. She was here.
Now, she’s not.
And her not-here-ness takes shape in the strangest places.
I miss her at Trader Joe’s—the one we wandered through together when I was barely hanging on, baby in tow, her steady as ever.
I miss her when I see Animal Crossing on my kids’ Nintendo Switch, reminded of our FaceTime dates during the summer of 2020 when we all deeply needed connection and levity, and she provided it via peach trees and Tom Nook.
I miss her when I scroll past her name in my saved voicemails, and can’t bring myself to delete them, but I also can’t bring myself to listen to them either.
I miss her when I go to send a message to our M7 grad school group chat, and remember there will always be someone missing from the thread.
There’s no big, capital-L lesson in her absence. No perfect bow to wrap around the grief. No silver lining. It’s just…there. In the nuances of my days. In the tenderness I extend to others. In how I check in on friends who say they’re “fine.” In the way I love people just a little bit harder, a little more urgently.
Because she would.
I carry Kim with me. On my hard days, I still hear her voice:
How are you really doing?
How are the boys?
Are you drinking water?
I remember what it felt like to be loved by her; that sacred kind of love—the kind that knows your truths before you say them out loud. On the hardest days, when it feels like I’m free falling into grief, I think of her and what she would say. And the truth is, I don’t know. I don’t know how she would want me or any of us to navigate her absence. What I do know is that she would want us to live.
If she were here, I’d tell her:
I love you.
We still talk about you all the time.
I miss you every damn day.
And she’d probably roll her eyes, tell me to shut up, and then we’d laugh. That full-body, soul-deep kind of laugh.
Kim was so much to so many. And for me, she will always be the one who reminded me—again and again—how to come back to myself.
What I’ve learned, if anything, is that grief doesn’t ask to be understood. It simply asks to be felt. And it makes a home in places we don’t expect: the grocery store aisles, the little digital traces left behind, the sound of a video game in the background, a pause in a group chat. I carry her in those moments, when the world keeps moving, and I find myself still wanting to tell her something.
Sometimes I do.
Sometimes I say it out loud, as if she’s just in the next room.
Sometimes I just close my eyes and feel her there, that small grin, her knowing laugh, her steady heart.
This isn’t a story with a moral. It’s a story with a pulse. A story of someone who mattered deeply and is missed endlessly.
If you’ve lost someone who once helped keep you afloat, I hope you find them again in the soft places—in your breath, your memories, the way you now love others a little more like they loved you.
That’s how I keep Kim close.
Not by moving on.
But by moving forward with her.