Tenderness

October 25th, 2026
7:08 a.m. Sunday. 47°/57°
@home

Tenderness.

How often have I turned tenderness away? Because it felt like too much to give and receive. I’ve hardened my response, stiffened my stance, buckled down on my position, resisted affection, affection of the heart and hand, walked away, didn’t call back, harbored my own narrative, took refuge in my solitude, denied I cared, pretended like it didn’t affect me, needed more explained, needed the perfect words to be said, and on and on and on.

Like an all-out effort had to be made to protect myself from feeling love and tenderness. As if love and tenderness were keeping me from being able to function as a responsible, mature adult.

I have resisted tenderness I could have freely given. I have resisted tenderness I could have freely received. I have more often than not allowed the critical voice in myself to win the debate over tenderness.

Because why?

Maybe because I was afraid of feeling the feelings that come with tenderness. How often have I coached myself to ignore what I really care about because I didn’t know how to feel the enormous amount of love and tenderness that exists? I’ve even tried to control this in my life.

A different aspect of grief has arrived.

She’s just visiting my sister in Vegas. She’s just home in Kenmore, and I’ll see her next week. The hope that she’s just temporarily away, but she’ll be back. She just hasn’t been able to call while she’s gone.

Surely those days all gathered around her, singing, laughing, crying, and tuned in to her every movement and need was just another family gathering. That couldn’t have been the final goodbye.

There was so much life left to be shared together. There was more kisses to plant on her cheek. There were more questions I had of her upbringing and what else did she have to say to me?

Surely she had a grand exit speech she wanted to share. Surely she had a specific message for me, her second-born daughter, and for my sisters and each of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Surely she had a parting message to take away all the sadness we would feel in her body’s retirement.

But no. It wasn’t a big grand exit with fireworks and speeches.

It was a tender gathering around the woman who is responsible for us being alive. To birth my mother into her next journey was full of tenderness.

All indifferences, all expectations, all differences, annoyances, irritations, and guardedness dissipated in those last moments. The only point of focus, laser focus, was to tenderly usher her out of this realm and on to the next.

There were no questions of, Do I stay or do I go? Everyone made the drive. Everyone made it top priority. Everyone came to be part of the mystery of death, the mystery of passing away.

We didn’t know what to expect, no expectations. We all entered the unknown with the matriarch of our family. We all showed up to surround her and each other with tenderness.