To Meet Grief With Presence

On listening better, staying longer, and returning with more heart.

There are moments when someone you love gives you a glimpse into their rawest inner world—and the only thing more painful than witnessing their suffering is realizing your first response, though sincere, didn’t meet the fullness of what was offered.

This happened to me in 2016.

A dear friend wrote to me during a time of deep anguish—watching her mother decline from metastatic cancer, reckoning with the enormity of grief, and holding the tender complexity of what it means to be a daughter at the edge of loss. Her letter was spacious, aching, precise. She gave language to the unnameable.

I wrote back as best as I could.

 

Hey Sweetie,

 

I don't know what to say except to tell you that I am glad you have shared and to keep doing it. I wish I had some magical words that will take this away but in reality, this is life and the only way out of it is through it.

 

This may sound weird and maybe even offensive but maybe what you can do is to take it all in. That way you know you are living and even though you and your mother did not share biology, what you shared was far more permanent and not as ephemeral as you might feel, and she lives long in your memory, in the recesses of those electrical pulses when you recall what once was.

 

I don't have any answers and I am learning to stop pretending that I do. What I can say is that I see you and I hear you and I am here with you.

 

Love,
Yong

Looking back now, I can feel both the sincerity of my words and their limitation. Not because they were wrong—but because they couldn’t yet hold the depth she had offered.

I was still learning how to stay present inside another’s pain without shrinking it. Still finding my way into the kind of witnessing that doesn't rush to soothe, doesn't bypass with hope or hollow reassurance, but simply stays.

And I want to be gentle with that younger version of myself. She tried. She wrote with heart. She showed up the best she could in that moment.

But today, after doing more of my own grief work—after watching my own mother age, after standing at my own thresholds of loss and uncertainty—I know how to return. And this is my return.

 

You honored her.
  Every word you shared is a prayer—of grief, love, history, and surrender.
  You wrote her back into her wholeness. And in doing so, you gave all of us a window into our own hearts.

 

Your mother may be crossing the threshold, but you are holding the doorway. Not with empty platitudes or premature closure, but with your trembling voice and unspeakable seeing. That is the most sacred act a daughter can do.

 

Your letter is not a burden—it is a sacred offering. It is what we mean when we say: may you be witnessed, may you be held.

 

I am holding you.

There are no perfect words for grief.
But sometimes, we can return—not to fix, not to impress, but to sit beside someone a little more deeply than we did before. As I deepen into the mystery of life, I find I can now tend to what was once missed - with more presence, more grace and a streadier heart

This is my return - not to rewrite the past, but to honor it more fully. To sit beside her sorrow with more room in me. To say what I wanted to say to say all along