In the end, it does matter

Grief doesn't come through a single door.

Psychotherapist Francis Weller writes that grief enters our lives through five gates:

1. The loss of those we love.

2. The unloved places within us.

3. The sorrows of the world.

4. The life we expected but never received.

5. The griefs our ancestors carried and couldn't put down. 

Over the next few blogs, I want to walk through each gate and see what's waiting on the other side. This is the first, and the most familiar: everything we love, we will lose. I wrote it the morning I learned a friend had died. 

This morning I learned that someone who walked beside me for a season is gone. And in the strange arithmetic of grief, what rose up first wasn't sadness; it was joy. Joy that I got to know someone who loved without keeping score, who cared without a ledger, who showed up in the world with a kind of quiet generosity that made you feel seen just by being near them.

I went looking through old photos. I found one I had almost forgotten, graffiti on a bridge, painted in someone's urgent hand: In the end, it does matter.

In the end, it does matter. Photo: Yurani Cubillos

It stopped me now the way it must have stopped me then.

The truth is, I hadn't spoken to them in years. And grief has a way of dragging the what-ifs up to the surface: What if I had reached out? What if I had said the thing I meant to say? What if we had found our way back to each other? I sat with those feelings. I let them be there. They deserve to be there.

But then something else settled in. Not every person in our lives is meant to stay for the whole journey. Some people are passengers; they board at exactly the right stop, they sit across from you for exactly the right stretch of miles, and then they step off, and the train keeps moving. That doesn't make them less real. 

This person rode with me for a while, and they changed the view.

We forget how much that matters. We get so tangled in the chase for more, faster, better, and bigger that we stop noticing the moon hanging low over the treeline, or the stranger struggling with her groceries, or the neighbor whose name we've never learned even after years of waving from driveways. We build lives designed to look impressive from the outside and wonder why they feel hollow from within. We tell ourselves we can do it alone, that needing people is a weakness, that asking for help is somehow shameful.

And then someone leaves, and you realize none of the armor mattered.

No one is remembered for their car, their square footage, or their perfect body. We are remembered, if we are lucky, truly remembered, for how we made people feel. For the warmth we left in a room. For loving without conditions attached.

My friend knew this. Maybe not as a philosophy, but as a practice. They just lived it.

So this is my promise, made in their memory and in the presence of that bridge and its painted truth: I will slow down. I will look up. I will ask for help and offer it freely. I will let people matter to me out loud, while I still can. And I will hold space for the passengers, welcome them fully, love them well, and release them without resentment when it's time.

Because the fact that they were here at all, that our paths crossed, that we shared even a small stretch of the ride, that is the gift.

Maybe that's what my promise really is: a way of tending. Francis Weller says it better than I ever could, and right now his words feel achingly relevant: 

“To alter the amnesia of our times, we must be willing to look into the face of the loss and keep it nearby. In this way, we may be able to honor the losses and live our lives as carriers of their unfinished stories. This is an ancient thought–𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘄𝗲 𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝘀 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗮𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘄𝗲 𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴.” 

-𝗙𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗶𝘀 𝗪𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗿