Run toward the darkness, sweet peas, and shine. - Cheryl Strayed

The best quotes don't speak to one particular truth, but rather to universal truths that resonate — across time, culture, gender, generation, and situation — in our own hearts and minds. They guide, motivate, validate, challenge, and comfort us in our own lives. They reiterate what we've figured out and remind us how much there is yet to learn. Pithily and succinctly, they lift us momentarily out of the confused and conflicted human muddle. Most of all, they tell us we're not alone. Their existence is proof that others have questioned, grappled with, and come to know the same truths we question and grapple with, too.

The same is true for your fiancée, Bewildered. She is your joy on wheels whose every experience is informed and altered by the fact that she lost the most essential, elemental, primal, and central person in her life too soon. I know this without knowing her. It will never be okay that she lost her mother. And the kindest, most loving thing you can do for her is to bear witness to that, to muster the strength, courage, and humility it takes to accept the enormous reality of its not okayness and be okay with it the same way she has to be. Get comfortable being the man who says Oh honey, I’m so sorry for your loss over and over again. That’s what the people who’ve consoled me the most deeply in my sorrow have done. They’ve spoken those words or something like them every time I needed to hear it; they’ve plainly acknowledged what is invisible to them, but so very real to me. I know saying those clichéd and ordinary things makes you feel squirmy and lame. I feel that way too when I say such things to others who have lost someone they loved. We all do. It feels lame because we like to think we can solve things. It feels insufficient because there is nothing we can actually do to change what’s horribly true.

We love and care for oodles of people, but only a few of them, if they died, would make us believe we could not continue to live. Imagine if there were a boat upon which you could put only four people, and everyone else known and beloved to you would then cease to exist. Who would you put on that boat? It would be painful, but how quickly you would decide: You and you and you and you, get in. The rest of you, goodbye.