I saw it on Facebook first. Maria, 49 years old, gone. The kind of news that stops you mid-scroll, that you read twice because you need to. A few minutes later, my daughter texted me from Amsterdam. She knew. Maria was someone that touched my daughter as well.

I sat with that for a moment. Maria, who I’d met through a friend, whose daughter grew up alongside mine from kindergarten. Maria, who had this warmth about her, this strength you could feel just being in the same room with her. A daughter, sister, wife, mother, aunt, friend . A physical trainer, a spin instructor, someone who spent her life getting other people to believe they were capable of more than they thought.

A few days before she passed, I sent her a message. I’m praying for you Maria, sending you love. She never answered. I found out later she was already beyond that. I keep thinking about that message sitting there, and I don’t know what to do with that.

When I heard she was sick again, something in me recognized the pattern. I reached out because I wanted to give her strength, the way I wished I could have given more to someone else I loved. I wanted to show up. And then I didn’t, not the way I meant to, and now I can’t.

I went to the viewing. That was as much as I could carry. Standing there, looking at her face, I said what I needed to say and I left.

A friend of hers who attended the service shared something afterward. Their priest had read a poem, “The Dash” by Linda Ellis, about the small line on a gravestone between the birth date and the death date. That dash is your whole life. Everything you did, everyone you loved, every ordinary Tuesday and every moment that mattered, all of it compressed into a mark so small you could miss it.

I read that and I had to put my phone down.

In 49 years, Maria filled that dash completely. She spent her life moving, getting other people to move with her, to push past what they thought they could do. She gave her warmth to anyone who needed it. She raised two children. She loved her husband. She showed up, over and over, for so many people. The outpouring after her death, the sheer number of people whose lives she touched, I had no idea, and yet somehow I’m not surprised. That was exactly who she was.

What her death did, the thing I wasn’t prepared for, was open up the loss of my friend Liz again.

Liz was my soul sister. We met as first-time mothers, young and overwhelmed and figuring it out together, and we never stopped talking after that. Deep conversations, buckets of laughter, the kind of friendship where you can say anything. She battled cancer more than once and every time she came back fighting, quietly, with so much dignity. When she died in August 2023, I wrote about her here because I didn’t know what else to do with the grief.

I thought I had learned to carry it. I hadn’t. I’d just learned to walk with it.

Two women. Both fighters. Both mothers. Both gone far too soon. One who knew every corner of my heart, and one I was just beginning to know, who I liked so much, who I kept thinking I’d have more time with. Grief, I’ve learned, doesn’t ask how close you were. It just arrives.

Both Liz and Maria’s children are still here. That’s the part that stays with me, that settles in and won’t move. These children, who still need their mothers. Who will always need their mothers.

I’m still here too. Still writing my dash, still trying to make it worth something. Still carrying the people I’ve loved and the people I didn’t get enough time with.

Both of them showed me how.

“Here’s to the tears of friendship. May they crystallize as they fall and be worn as gems in the memory of those we love.”

— Christina Applegate, You With the Sad Eyes: A Memoir

If you’re reading this, you’re still writing your dash too. I’d love to hear who you’re carrying with you.

June 2026

Anxiety doesn’t knock. It doesn’t announce itself or wait for a convenient moment. It just shows up, in the middle of a perfectly ordinary Tuesday, in the quiet space between one thought and the next, in the chest, in the stomach, in the place behind your eyes where the pressure builds before you even have a name for what’s happening.

I know this feeling well. And lately, it has been showing up more than I would like.

I am someone who presents well. I walk into rooms, I engage, I show up for the people I love. From the outside, nothing looks wrong. That is the thing about anxiety that nobody talks about enough, it is almost entirely invisible. You can be sitting at a dinner table, laughing at something, and simultaneously feel like the walls are closing in. You can look completely fine and feel completely undone.

That disconnect is exhausting in a way that is hard to explain to someone who hasn’t felt it.

Anxiety has many faces. For some people it’s a racing heart and a sense of immediate dread. For others it is quieter, a low hum of worry that never fully goes away, a tendency to catastrophize, a mind that will not stop running through every possible thing that could go wrong. Sometimes it is both, depending on the day.

Where does it come from? That is the question I keep asking myself. Some of it is the accumulation of loss, grief has a long tail and it touches everything. Some of it is the uncertainty that comes with this season of life, the questions that don’t have answers yet. Some of it is just the world, which asks a lot of us right now. And some of it, if I am honest, comes from inside, from a nervous system that has been running on high alert for so long it has forgotten what calm feels like.

There are things that help. Movement helps, not for weight, not for any other reason, just for the way it pulls you back into your body and out of your head. Breathing, real deliberate breathing, helps more than I ever wanted to admit because it sounds too simple to work and yet it does. Talking helps, when you have someone safe to talk to. Prayer helps.

But I want to be honest with you. These things manage it. They don’t cure it. There are still mornings I wake up with that weight already sitting on my chest before I have done anything to deserve it. There are still days when I do everything right and the anxiety shows up anyway. And on those days I don’t have a solution. I just have the willingness to keep going anyway.

I think that is what nobody tells you about anxiety. It is not something you fix once and move on from. It is something you learn to live alongside. Some seasons it quiets down. Some seasons it gets louder. Right now, for me, it’s loud.

And I am writing about it anyway. Because I know I am not the only one sitting with this. Because somewhere someone is reading this at 2am feeling completely alone in it, and I want them to know they are not.

That is enough. For tonight, that is enough.

My daughter is studying abroad this semester, living her life, as she should, in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And I am proud of her. But pride and peace are two different things, and a mother’s heart doesn’t always know how to hold both at once.

So when the worry crept in quietly at 3am the way it always does, I did what mothers do. I booked the flights. My sister didn’t hesitate for a moment. That’s the thing about the people who love you. They don’t need a long explanation. They just say when do we leave?

And so we went.

Amsterdam doesn’t overwhelm you. It opens, slowly, graciously, like a book you can’t put down. The canals wind through the city like quiet conversations. The streets hum with cyclists and flower stalls bursting with tulips, and the light that falls over the water in the late afternoon is unlike anything I have ever seen.

It is the kind of place that makes you walk slower, breathe deeper, and look up. The people match the city, unhurried, warm, genuinely kind in a way that stays with you long after you’ve gone home.

Amsterdam is a city that feeds you well…just not always in the way you might expect. The real culinary magic lives in its extraordinary diversity. The Indonesian rijsttafel, the Surinamese roti, the Turkish kebabs, the Moroccan tagines, this is a city shaped by centuries of global trade, and its food tells that story beautifully.

But what made this trip extraordinary wasn’t the architecture or the cuisine. It was the people who showed up.

My cousins drove three and a half hours from Germany just to be with us. No grand gesture, no announcement, that kind of love simply shows up.

And my best friend since childhood, who lives just outside Amsterdam in Rotterdam, met us with the kind of ease that only decades of real friendship can produce. We have lived entire lifetimes since we were girls together, raised children, buried parents, laughed and cried and survived.

To sit across from her again, after all this life, laughing over a long meal like no time had passed at all, that was the whole trip right there.

Reunited after so much life lived.

Bicycles at every corner, the true pulse of Amsterdam.

Amsterdam runs on two wheels. And woven through all of it, every canal walk, every neighborhood, every crowded dinner table was my daughter. Watching her move through that beautiful city with confidence and grace, seeing the world she had quietly made her own, gave me something no itinerary could have planned.

I came to make sure she was safe. What I found was that she was thriving.

For a mother who has watched her only child walk into the world, suitcase in hand, there is no greater gift than that.

King’s Day flowers on the canal

Amsterdam gave me breathtaking canals, welcoming friendly people, vibrant neighborhoods and some of the most stunning scenery I have ever witnessed. But what it really gave me was a reminder of who I am. Connection. Family. Friendship. The extraordinary miracle of people who love you enough to show up.

Even in the rain, Amsterdam is magical.

If Amsterdam is ever on your list of places to see move it to the top. Walk its streets without an agenda. Let the canals slow you down. Eat your way through its neighborhoods. And if you can bring the people who matter most along with you, do that too. Those are the trips that don’t leave you.