Something about the way you phrased your comment resonated with me. I think the bluntness reminded me of the way I felt when I was working through my moms death. One of the first things I realized was that I didn’t want another sorry, I didn’t want another well intentioned anecdote — I wanted to tell people what it was like to hurt like I hurt, and I wanted them to understand.

But that’s depressing, and it’s not polite, and it makes people uncomfortable when they’re just trying their best to be comforting. Most people aren’t prepared to talk about what it feels like to be so completely enveloped by loss that the rest of the world becomes something in the distance moving on without you.

I struggled with that for years until I finally joined a group at my high school for kids who’d lost parents. It was the first time I heard other people speak about what they were going through in a way that I could really understand. It was the first time I could straight up say how fucked I thought the world was, and instead of “oh yeah I was sad when my dog died” I instead got “me too.”

I guess the point of this is that you’re not alone in the world — there are other people who feel your pain, and those people, me included, want to share with you whatever small bit of love we can because we know how much it’s really worth.