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Most of what gets said about grief is about the beginning of it. The shock, the fog, the casseroles, the first unbearable weeks. There is far less language for what comes later, for the quieter territory on the far side of that first sorrow, when the heaviest weight begins to lift and life, almost without permission, starts to expand again.

For people whose mothers have died, whose mothers were complicated or harmful, who lost children of their own, who longed for motherhood and could not reach it, who are mothering people separated from them by borders or war, the day arrives like a wound reopened.

My dog Lady, a Pekingese, kept me going in life for many years. She came to me from someone who was moving into an apartment and couldn’t take a pet. I didn’t get all the details but I learned they “played rough.” She was so scared when she came to me. She was five. She couldn’t be easily rehomed because of her trauma, aSachment issues and later she developed high medical needs.

You have to be really determined to find an off grid phone booth in the middle of the desert. And I was. I was determined to find the Joshua Tree Wind Phone last week. A wind phone is an altar. It's an art installation. It's a spiritual portal, a shrine and a memorial. But most importantly, a wind phone is an invitation.

Grief reshapes us. It arrives uninvited, suddenly rewiring the world we thought we understood. When someone we love passes, we’re left holding fragments of a life—photos scattered across old phones, messages trapped inside accounts no one can access, memories fading faster than we ever expected. And in those moments, one truth becomes painfully clear: We don’t just grieve the person we lost. We grieve everything we can no longer remember.

“I’m angry, and I don’t know what to do with my anger.” Anger has fueled the response to AIDS since the very beginning. So it is not surprising that the anger felt these days is reminiscent of those early, terrifying days. The difference, though, is simple: forty years ago we were angry that we had no way to stop it, no way to help; today we have the tools, but they’re being taken away.

Pain is the stain of your name Tattooed on my heart The only voice in my brain The only indication that you remain The one tear in the rain You grab my heart anyway Even if I try to run away

There came a point in my father’s long illness when he could no longer heal. We had seen this before in animals on our farm: goats whose knees would no longer bend, old roosters who turned their shrunken combs away from the watering can. With livestock, the signs are easy to recognize, and our responsibility is simple mercy. The relief of their suffering is a quick end. With humans, it’s more complicated. At just 68, Dad’s body was infirm, ravaged by decades of abuse and illness, finally a casualty of the relentless degradation of time.

We've all heard it: "Why would a God who is all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful allow bad things to happen to good people?" Or, flipped around: "Why shouldn’t life contain pain, disappointment, and suffering? Was life ever meant to be perfect, free from challenges or loss?"

There's this assumption that healing happens in isolation, that we need to figure out our pain alone before we can rejoin society, but sometimes the opposite is true. Sometimes we heal by witnessing each other's struggles, by discovering that our individual heartbreak is part of a much larger story.

In a world adamant on pushing through and hiding your emotions, grief focused podcasts feel like a breath of fresh air. They give the experience of having your pain acknowledged by someone who has walked a similar path.

“If” is a deeply introspective meditation on grief, love, identity, and the search for meaning in a chaotic world. Through a series of poignant “if” statements, the speaker wrestles with existential questions, emotional vulnerability, and the ache of loss.