She Would Have Told Me to Move On Already

Three years of fog, anger, and grief, and the moment I finally heard Josi's voice again.

For three years, I could not say her name without the emotion rising up before I could stop it. Not sadness exactly, though that was there too. Anger, mostly. And a kind of fog that settled over everything and didn't fully lift.

That was my life after losing Josi.

And the hardest part, the part nobody around me seemed to understand, was that I wasn't just grieving a person. I was grieving my person. The one who knew things about me nobody else knew. The one I called when everything was too much. The one who would have known exactly what to say and when to say nothing at all.

When you lose that, you don't just lose someone you love. You lose the place you went to feel understood.

We Lost Years We Can't Get Back. Then We Lost Everything.

Josi and I had the kind of friendship that required no maintenance. Effortless. Unconditional. The kind where you could pick up mid-sentence after months of silence and nothing had changed.

And then we let it go quiet for the wrong reasons. Pride. Outside noise. Ego. Neither of us even remembered what it was actually about anymore, we just knew the silence had gone on long enough that crossing back felt complicated. We both carried shame about that. Years of it.

But we found our way back. Back to exactly what we had always been to each other. And for a while, we had it again, that effortless, unconditional thing that most people spend their whole lives looking for.

And then she died.

She should still be here. I know that the way I know few things, completely without doubt

She was stubborn. She ignored symptoms. There was a fall. And somewhere in the sequence of things that followed, there were decisions made and procedures not followed and a life that did not have to end when it did.

I have sat with that for three years. The anger of it. The sheer, relentless unfairness of it.

Grieving My Person While Holding Everyone Else Together

What made those three years harder than I have ever admitted publicly is that I wasn't only grieving Josi.

I was also walking alongside my mother through cancer. Coaching her through natural healing, where the outcome was so uncertain.

And the person I would have called, the person who would have known how frightened I was, who would have heard the things I couldn't say to anyone else, who would have sat on the phone with me at midnight when the fear got too loud, was gone.

I had never understood until then how much of my own capacity to cope was held in that one relationship. When Josi died, I didn't just lose her. I lost the version of myself that felt held. And I had to keep showing up, for my mother, for my kids, for work, for everyone, while quietly falling apart in a fog that had no edges and no end.

I was angry at everyone who couldn't understand what her absence actually cost me. And I was exhausted from carrying something I had no language for.

My son shares her birthday. Every year, there is an extra candle. This past year he asked “who was Josi again?” it tore me apart.

My kids deserved to grow up knowing her. She would have loved them the way only Josi could, completely, and without conditions. That unfairness lived in my chest alongside everything else, and it grew.

The Thing Nobody Said Until Someone Finally Did

I don't know exactly when the fog started to thin. It wasn't one moment. It was slow, and uneven, and some days it still rolls back in.

But I know the moment something actually shifted.

A friend said to me, plainly, without softening it, that Josi would be pissed at me. That she would have looked at me, three years into the fog, and told me to stop. To move on. To get on with what I was supposed to be doing instead of wasting the time and energy she would never get.

And I laughed and cried at the same time.

Because that was Josi. That was exactly her. No performance of grief, no patience for wallowing, no tolerance for anyone she loved making themselves smaller than they were. She would have had no time for my fog. She would have named it for what it was and told me to move.

I heard her voice in those words. And that was the first time in three years that hearing her didn't only hurt.

She Didn't Become a Lesson. She Became a Presence.

I can talk about her now without breaking completely. I can laugh about the things we shared  the things only we would find funny, the things that made no sense to anyone else. I can remember her without the grief swallowing the memory whole.

That took three years. And it wasn't linear, and it wasn't clean, and I am not going to tell you there was a process or a framework that got me here. There wasn't. There was time, and honesty, and eventually one friend who said the true thing instead of the kind thing.

What I can tell you is this: I hear Josi in the work I do. In Veracia. In the women I sit across from who are carrying something heavy and have no language for it yet. In the moments where I know exactly what needs to be said and I say it, direct, no softening, no performance.

That is her. That has always been her.

She didn't become a lesson. She became part of how I move through the world. She is still my person, just differently now.

 If you are in the fog, the grief that has anger in it, the loss that has no clean edges, the kind of missing someone that nobody around you fully understands, I am not going to tell you it lifts on a timeline.

But I will tell you what Josi would have said:

You already know what you need to do. Stop wasting time.

She would not have been wrong.

Written by Angela Valeri | Founder, Veracia Life Coaching

If this named something you have been carrying, Veracia works with women who are ready to understand what they are holding — not manage it, understand it.