Majestically Navigating Grief

I have spent much of my life being the anchor for others.  But losing my greatest cheerleader, my listening ear, the keeper of secrets beyond imagination, and my best friend of 23 years has taught me something profound: everyone eventually reaches a point where strength is no longer a choice. Sometimes grief simply arrives and demands to be felt.

Twenty-one days before she passed, she sent me a text: "Just always remember me & tell my story about the real me ok?" More messages followed in the minutes, hours, and days after that—playful, funny, and unmistakably her. Looking back now, I find myself wondering: Was it intuition? Did she know something I didn't? Or was it simply us being us—two people who shared a connection deep enough to occasionally reveal the tender, sensitive sides of ourselves that so few others ever got to see?

The truth is, I don't know. What I do know is that those words have become a responsibility I carry with me. Whether they came from a quiet awareness of what was ahead or from a moment of honest vulnerability, they matter now in a way they never could have then.

Perhaps grief makes us search for meaning in every conversation, every text, every memory. We revisit moments and wonder if there were signs hidden between the lines. Sometimes there were. Sometimes there weren't. But what remains undeniable is that, in those words, she asked to be remembered...not as a perfect person, not as an idealized memory, but as her real self.

And maybe that's the greatest gift a friend can leave behind: not all the answers, but a story worth telling.  So this is me keeping a promise. I remember her. I tell her story.

And in doing so, I carry a piece of her forward, even as I learn to walk through a world that feels unimaginably different without my best friend beside me. The question of whether she knew may never be answered. The certainty that she was loved, however, never needs to be.

In Loving Memory of crystal Leigh laughlin (april 11, 1981-april 20, 2026)

to be continued…

FLORIDA 2013