It was hot. Not the Texas kind of hot that I am tying to acclimate to, the kind that wraps around your ankles before sunrise and clings to your back like a wet towel. No, this was Midwest hot. Heavy. Still. It pressed against your skin like a wool blanket and made the air feel thick with memory. It did not seem as though Galesburg, Illinois has changed much since I last visited in 1994, but walking into it this time felt completely different. I wasn’t a kid in the backseat anymore. This time, I was returning without my parents, without my grandmother. Just me. And a quiet kind of grief I hadn’t expected.

We placed my mother in her final resting place, right next to her mother. I hugged people I hadn’t seen since high school. I met others who had known my mom when she was young, when I was just an idea floating around in her someday. The grief was thick, like fog. But so was the beauty. In the stories shared, the way people remembered her laugh, her strength, her stubborn streak. I stood in the center of a story I hadn’t opened in years and realized: even though my mom, dad, and grandma are gone, family still surrounded me.

It was disorienting and grounding all at once. Like walking through a house you haven’t visited in decades and finding that the light still hits the windows in the exact same way. Grief isn’t tidy. It’s not a before and after. It’s a constant in-between. A stretch of road where the scenery is both familiar and unrecognizable. I felt it all in one day: the ache of loss and the gift of connection, the quiet absence of those who shaped me, and the loud presence of those who remember them with me.

And there, somewhere in that swirling mix of memory and mourning, I tasted something unexpected: joy.

At Pizza Ranch, of all places, after days of travel and emotion, I skipped the pizza and scooped fried chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, and corn onto my plate. As a kid, I couldn’t handle my food touching. School lunch trays were my favorite, each item in its assigned spot. My boys later taught me to stir corn into mashed potatoes and gravy. I always found it ridiculous.

But that day in Galesburg, I tried it. And I loved it.

The salt, the creaminess, the sweet pop of corn all swirled together in a bite that tasted like comfort, like childhood, like coming home in the middle of heartache.

There are moments when life is both loss and grace, goodbye and hello, funeral and feast. And somehow, in that collision, we are reminded that we are still here. Still tasting. Still loving. Still learning how to let joy and sorrow sit at the same table.

So I’m asking you today:
When have you been in a space between heavy grief and impossible beauty?

Maybe it was around a graveside. Or maybe it was in a church pew, a hospital hallway, a quiet drive home. Maybe it tasted like corn and mashed potatoes on a plate you never thought you’d fill like that. And maybe, in that sacred in-between, you felt both the weight of what was lost and the light of what still remains.

Gracefully yours,

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