Life’s Threads: The Call You Hope Never Comes
Why community matters more now than it ever did in our younger years.
Ben was watering his flower garden when his world shifted. One moment of sunlight on marigolds. One unexpected number on his comm. Riley saw the stillness in him from her porch. She knew that look. Most of us do. Something in his face said he was no longer standing where he had been a minute ago.
There is a moment in life when the ordinary cracks. A phone rings. A name appears. A voice says a few words and suddenly you are carrying years of unfinished history in your chest. The ground under you is the same, yet it feels different. And somehow you have to walk forward.
Ben had not spoken to his brother in ten years. The fight between them had hardened into something he assumed would last forever. Then the call came. Serious illness. Time running short. A request to come now. Not later. Now.
What stayed with me, writing this week’s story, was not the illness. It was the way the women moved toward Ben. Quiet. Certain. No fixing. No pressure. Just the kind of presence that lets a person breathe again. Riley steady at his side. Raven finding him when he was trying not to break. Val ready to rally the others. Each one offers something simple and human.
Many of us have lived a version of that day. The call from a sibling you have not seen in years. The call about a parent who is slipping. The call that sends you back into a story you thought you had set down. You are not ready, but the moment does not wait for readiness.
And here is something we do not say out loud often enough.
Losing someone does not end your need. Not in a month. Not in a season. Sometimes not in a year or two. Life keeps moving around you long after grief settles into your bones. You still need company. You still need tenderness. You still need someone to sit beside you when the tears fall again without warning.
Because they do fall.
Not only grief itself, but the quiet fear behind it.
The reminder that if someone your age can slip away, so can you. Mortality stops being an idea. It becomes a hallway we know we will walk one day, and every loss opens the door a little wider.
This is why community matters more now than it ever did in our younger years.
Not for distraction. Not for noise. For the steady human truth that none of us should have to carry these moments alone.
Courage in later life is not loud. It looks like packing one small bag, like getting into a car with someone who will not let you fall apart. It looks like walking back into a room filled with old hurt and choosing to be present anyway.
It can look like coming home with a small seashell in your pocket, a reminder that you showed up even when you were shaking.
If you have lived through one of those calls, or if you are holding your breath waiting for one, know this. You do not have to hold yourself together every time. You do not have to pretend your strength is endless. You can lean. You can ask. You can let someone sit with you while you say, “I do not know how this ends.”
And sometimes the most important words in a lifetime are the ones Ben heard when he arrived.
“You came.”
A whole world can shift inside those words.
We have all lost someone, and the holidays make the absence louder. The first year is always the hardest.
Riley wrote an entry in her secret journal at 32, her first Thanksgiving without her mother. It is not a year she speaks of often. Riley is just a woman facing a day that feels too big and too empty.
If you'd like to see Riley’s entry, and all of the secret journals, I invite you to come Inside. 👇