A Soft Place for Sorrow

A Journal Entry ~Los Angeles

I’m here, in LA, visiting my son, Roland. I boarded a plane the day after Marcia passed away. A risky trip, flying across the country while in chemo recovery. But my heart needed to go, immediately.

My body went into autopilot. My heart is still trying to catch up. My body, and my mind are tired, fragile.

Being in Los Angeles with Roland, in the California sun right now feels like a soothing balm, a comforting blanket…a hug that only California can give. This sorrow, this love had nowhere to go while siting in my apartment in PA. The “air” felt too heavy to breathe, a mixture of deep love, overwhelming absence, and numbness.

The ending, the last time I saw Marcia, and her death were all so complicated, and felt sooo fucking rushed. Guilt, mixed in with this sorrow of grief feels overwhelming. I don’t know what to do with this swirl of emotional numbness. These past few days have been… strange. The kind of overwhelming where the world feels muted, as if I’m watching it from behind the safety of thick and blurred glass.

Marcia.
A dear friend.
A woman I’ll miss more than I can say.
Our friendship was layered—deep with an underline complexity, loving and fun, but not always easy. Our final weeks were tender and hard. I wasn’t at my best. I shut down. I withdrew. My body was loud with pain and fatigue, and I didn’t have space for anything else. I asked her to leave my home because I was not able to give her the care that she needed, nor the care that I wanted to give…but could not find within in my own tattered being.

And now she’s gone.

That’s where the guilt lives…in the space between what was, and what I wish I could go back and do again. I keep thinking of all the time I wasted. I didn’t listen to my heart. I only listened to my body. And now, shame sits with me. I feel broken. I asked my dying friend to leave. I made it all about me. I did not walk in her shoes, I did not put myself in her place, I did not act from a place of understanding. I acted from the very selfish place of survival mode. I wish I had paused, dug deeper for reserve, and compassion to care for my friend.

“Women should never apologize for taking care of themselves.”
That’s what Marcia always told me.
She would have said it again. And again.
And then she would’ve sat with me. Quietly.
Letting me cry.
Telling me she loved me. That there was nothing to forgive. That she knew. That she saw me, even when I couldn’t show up the way I wanted to.

I’m trying so hard to hold on to that.

Sorrow, I’m learning, is not just sadness. It’s sadness mixed with memory, love, regret. It carries an ache and tenderness, but also depth…that rises when something meaningful…something with roots is lost.

This sorrow feels different to me…different from grief alone. It’s grief…with reflection. And it tastes like shame, too. Especially when the ending wasn’t clean or easy. Especially when I feel I failed someone I loved. This sorrow arises where love once lived peppered with the regret, an anger, the guilt, the unspoken words, and the heartbreak of being flawed in a moment that asked more of me than I had to give.

I struggle to make peace with the timing of things. I wonder how to justify the fact that I asked her to leave my home in one breath, and flew to California in the next…risking exposure, risking my health.

But here’s what I’m starting to see, what is coming up for me as I take walks through Highland Park, the Huntington Gardens and along the waters of the Pacific.

I was in survival mode.
Then and now.

I made the best decision I could, in a body that was hurting and a mind clouded with exhaustion. I wasn’t rejecting her. I was trying to protect if not save myself. The love never left, sadly, I just didn’t have the capacity to express it the way she deserved. That’s the most painful part. But it’s not the whole story.

When she died, something in me broke open. And even in the risk, I knew I had to go. To California. To family. To let myself be supported by my family, by dear friends, because the sorrow, the grief was threatening to drown me. One choice was to protect my body. The other was to protect my spirit.

Both were made from deep consideration and love
Even if they don’t look like it on the outside.
Even if the shame still whispers otherwise.

So today, I hold these truths.
I wasn’t perfect.
I was loving.
I am grieving.
I am trying.

A friend once told me, “Sorrow is love in the shape of ache.”

And in that ache, I find Marcia again. Not to fix what’s gone, but to feel what’s still here.

That, she is still with me.
In her fierce tenderness. In her forgiveness. In her voice, whispering

“There is nothing to forgive.
I love you, Leora
You did what you had to do.”