This is not the post I was going to write today.
I don’t write about myself. Super Awesome People™ isn’t about me; It’s about the people I aspire to be—the passionate changemakers, the selfless fighters for justice, the brilliant entrepreneurs; the artists, athletes, educators, professionals, and everyday people who make the world better through their courage, creativity, and compassion.
My goal is to share their stories, not my own. But today, I felt compelled to write about a very personal experience.
(Danielle MacInnes, Unsplash) 
(Anastasia Dulgier, Unsplash)
A friend of mine (neighbor? acquaintance? friend, I think) recently suffered the sudden loss of a pet, and I was shocked by how hard it hit me. I knew the cat fairly well as her frequent cat-sitter, but she wasn’t *my* fur baby. And yet, I felt my neighbor’s pain like it was my own.
Over the years, I’ve lost a cat, grandparents, a brother, and a father. And yet, despite my decades of experience, I felt that there was nothing I could say, and maybe nothing I could do, that would ease her pain. And I worried that I might somehow make her sorrow worse in my ignorance of how best to offer comfort. We weren’t close enough that I could anticipate her needs.
And yet, I could imagine her pain. Her sadness, shock, heartbreak, anger, guilt, helplessness—the aching rawness of grief that comes in waves—flowing, swelling, breaking. Over time, the grief ebbs, but it never fully recedes. Its tides are unpredictable, and its depths, unknown.
I could imagine her grief; I could relate her loss to my own, but I still felt helpless to ease her pain. How frustrating that my empathy and experiences with mourning couldn’t be put to better use. Humanity has suffered so much death and grief over the millennia—when will we evolve to better cope with it; to better help those most in need?
Ultimately, I could offer her my presence as a stand-in for her loved ones who couldn’t be there in the immediate aftermath of her loss. If we weren’t quite friends before, we were friends after. We sat together for hours—drinking, talking, crying. I wish I could have done more to help ease her pain. But maybe what I did was enough.