I wrote this on Instagram nearly a year ago and as the third anniversary of Natasha‘s death rapidly approaches, this still rings very true.

-Tomorrow marks two years since Natasha left this realm. And there’s been this drawing going around about how grief doesn’t get smaller, you just grow around it. I hold onto that image in my head for hope because over the last two years it has only felt as if the grief has stayed the same large lump in my chest and I have shrunk around it. I keep saying I don’t know how to connect with people to form or maintain friendships anymore but the more I sit with that sentiment the more I realize that it’s not that I don’t know how, it’s that the ways in which I do so now have shifted dramatically. And that shift has left me at odds with how society views the forming of friendships and the types of bonds that “should” look like.

I know it’s hard to sit with me with my pain, I know it well because I sit with it every day. And it’s a strange place to be, navigating this during a time when most people are tapped out entirely and being able to hold space for people in the ways they cannot show up for others but simultaneously be so hurt and angry at the silence and expectation to hold it all nearly alone.

All the major deaths in my life have come after a culmination of a million little deaths since we made the decision to move to Vermont. It’s been a long and tiring 5 years. I sobbed in the car while driving this morning, like I did the night I found out that Natasha was gone. And the tears keep coming, endlessly.

I am so weary.

And I only crave to have a friend come and hold my hand and let me know I am still worthy of friendship and to sit with me in my grief.

Tomorrow is a reminder of the friendship that finally felt so full and safe and connected and the failure I feel as a friend as she slipped quietly from my life.-

Nov. 22, 2021