Buddy story · Grief
Two people who were grieving as well
Nell and Tarn both started within a year of a bereavement, and both had found that nobody would let the two things sit in the same sentence.
- Paired
- September 2025
- Cadence
- Sundays
- Status
- ongoing
The problem they describe is a particular kind of loneliness: everyone wanted to talk about one thing or the other, and the two were completely entangled, and separating them for other people's comfort was exhausting.
What they do is let both sit in the same message with no explanation. A line about a father. A line about a Tuesday. No transition, no apology, no attempt to relate one to the other.
The grief-and-eating circle exists partly because of a conversation these two started in a check-in, and Jonah, who holds the adjacent ground, keeps a light hand on it. Neither of them wants it to become a bereavement group and both are firm that eating changes after a death in ways nobody warns you about, in both directions.
People wanted one subject at a time. The two were the same subject and I had run out of energy for translating.
A line about my mother, a line about a Tuesday, no bridge between them. Nobody else lets me write like that.