Who's Comforting Whom?
Sometimes the person we think we're going to comfort is the one who reminds us how to live
Last summer, my best friend’s husband died while windsurfing the Columbia River.
He had suffered a heart attack on the water.
He was the fittest man any of us knew.
Within an hour of getting the call, I had connected with her son and her former husband. We climbed into my van in Jackson Hole and drove twelve hours straight through, arriving in Hood River just after midnight.
There are moments in life when you don’t ask what you should do.
You simply go.
I thought I was driving there to help my friend survive the worst day of her life.
And I did.
Last year.
This week, almost exactly a year later, I made the same drive.
This time there was no emergency.
Just two old friends spending a week together.
As I pulled into her driveway, I wondered how she was doing.
Twenty-four hours later, I found myself asking a very different question.
Whose comforting whom?
Her home feels alive.
Family photographs fill the shelves and walls. Art projects rest on the table, waiting to be picked up again. There is the quiet evidence of a life still being lived.
Nothing has been erased.
Nothing has been frozen in time.
It struck me that grief hadn’t become the whole story of this house.
It had simply become one room in it.
Standing there, another realization caught me completely off guard.
My own photographs have never really made it back onto the walls.
Over the past eleven years, I’ve moved from house to house, lived between states, staged homes for sale, packed boxes, unpacked them, only to pack them again. Somewhere along the way, the framed memories stayed wrapped in paper.
Some of those photographs are complicated.
My former husband is in them.
So are my stepchildren, whom I still love and miss.
My son—smiling as a little boy, then later, during the years that nearly broke both of us.
Vacations.
Christmas mornings.
Birthdays.
A whole life that was real, even though it didn’t last forever.
I told myself I was just busy.
Standing in my friend’s home, I wondered if something else had happened.
Had I quietly packed away parts of my own life because they hurt too much to look at?
For the past few months I’ve been reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning again.
When I first read it years ago, I understood it intellectually.
This time, I recognized myself in it.
Not because my suffering resembles his—it doesn’t.
But because I’ve been living inside my own search for meaning.
What gives life meaning after the children are grown?
After you’ve built and sold the company?
After the relationship you thought might become your future vanishes?
Who are you when no one urgently needs you today?
Those questions have followed me since turning sixty.
Sometimes quietly.
Sometimes relentlessly.
I’ve mistaken them for loneliness.
For depression.
For restlessness.
Now I wonder if they’ve really been something else.
An invitation to stop shrinking from the truth.
Last week I wrote about learning to care deeply and grip lightly.
I’ve been practicing detachment.
Not indifference.
Love without demanding an outcome.
Interestingly, there has been movement.
In my work.
In my heart.
Perhaps that’s what happens when we stop trying to force life into the shape we imagined.
I don’t know where any of it will lead.
And for once, I don’t feel like I need to.
In less than a month, I’ll begin walking the Walker’s Haute Route.
One hundred and twenty miles from Chamonix to Zermatt.
I’ll be walking alone.
For weeks I’ve been wondering if that makes me brave...
or simply lonely.
I’ve caught myself thinking,
Is this really what my life has become?
Another solo adventure.
Another airport.
Another mountain.
Another beautiful place with no one waiting at the end of the day.
But sitting in my friend’s home, something shifted.
She didn’t choose the life she’s living now.
None of us would.
And yet she isn’t waiting for the old life to return before allowing herself to live this one.
She is making art.
Inviting friends.
Cooking dinner.
Remembering.
Laughing.
Grieving.
Living.
All at the same time.
It made me ask myself a harder question.
What have I been waiting for?
The perfect relationship?
The perfect place to live?
The certainty that I’ve finally figured out the rest of my life?
Have I been postponing joy until everything made sense?
If so, that’s a heartbreaking way to spend the years we have left.
Maybe the Walker’s Haute Route isn’t another adventure to prove that I’m capable.
Maybe it’s a pilgrimage.
Not to discover who I am.
Not to leave my old life behind, but to gather all of it and carry it forward.
To begin living as the woman I’m becoming.
For a long time, I thought becoming Unsmallable meant saying yes to bigger adventures.
Higher mountains.
Bolder dreams.
A larger life.
I’m beginning to think I was wrong.
Maybe becoming Unsmallable begins somewhere much quieter.
By refusing to shrink from the truth.
The truth about what we’ve lost.
The truth about whom we’ve loved.
The truth about the photographs we’ve packed away.
The truth that some chapters end.
The truth that meaning isn’t found once and for all.
It is made, again and again, by choosing to participate fully in the life that is right in front of us.
I came to Hood River thinking I was checking on my friend.
Instead, she reminded me of something I had quietly forgotten.
The goal isn’t to get over the past.
The goal is to stop packing it away.
To let every chapter belong.
To make room for grief without evicting joy.
In a few weeks, I’ll shoulder my pack and begin walking across the Alps.
I don’t know exactly what I’ll find.
But I know this.
For the first time in a long time, I’m not walking away from my life.
I’m walking deeper into it.
Love,
Susan
I’d love to hear from you.
Have you ever packed away a part of your life because it hurt too much to look at?
Or found yourself asking what gives life meaning after everything you worked so hard to build had changed?
Leave a comment. I read every one.
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We’re building a community of people who are choosing not to shrink from the truth—and, in doing so, are becoming Unsmallable.
Can’t wait to hear how this adventure goes! You will undoubtedly have wonderful encounters with exceptional people.