what i learned from a widow's silence

A widow walked up to me at a viewing in 2019 and said five words I’m still thinking about, six years later.

She’d been a wife for thirty-two years. She looked at her husband, then back at me, and said: “I don’t know how to feel anything anymore.”

I told her that was okay.

I lied. I didn’t know if it was okay. Her face was the face of someone who’d been holding her breath for so long she’d forgotten what air felt like. Any answer I gave her was going to land in that held-breath place, so I picked the gentlest one I had.

She nodded once. Then she straightened the collar of her husband’s suit jacket. Not because it needed straightening. Because she needed something to do with her hands. After eleven years working in funeral homes, I’ve watched a thousand people do that exact gesture. Most of them don’t realize they’re doing it.

Watching her, I learned the part of grief most people miss. The loudest part isn’t tears or eulogies or the clatter of a casket being closed. The loudest part is the part nobody says out loud.

That line ended up in a song. Two friends I trust told me to cut it. They thought it was too on-the-nose. I cut it. I sat with the cut for a week. Then I put the line back in.

I almost cut it because it felt obvious to me. But what’s obvious to a former funeral director isn’t obvious to a 33-year-old in Atlanta with three browser tabs open at midnight and a parent she hasn’t called in nine months. Obvious to me is news to somebody else. That’s the curse of having seen something up close — you stop believing other people might still need to see it.

Most of what I write now — the songs, the livestreams, notes like this one — comes from that gap. Things I learned to take for granted around a funeral home that the rest of the world has never been close enough to notice. My job, more and more, is to say the obvious thing out loud, in case somebody on the other end didn’t know they were waiting to hear it.

“Feel Anything” is the song this whole thing is named after. There’s a reason. It’s the closest I’ve come to writing a permission slip — not for me, for you. Permission to feel relieved when relief shouldn’t be in the room. Permission to feel nothing when feeling something would be more polite. Permission to feel anything.

If you haven’t heard it yet, this is me asking you to.

Press play once. If it doesn’t land, don’t owe me a thing.

P.S. After you listen, hit reply with the line that hits you hardest. I read every reply, even the ones I take a week to get to.

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