No dramatic intervention. No televised tears. Just a co-worker who became the kind of friend who shows up when the lights go down and the cameras stop rolling. That’s the part of the story worth slowing down for. Because what Alesha did for Amanda is the exact thing most of us are terrible at, and the exact thing the people we love need most.
Here’s what gets lost in the headline. Amanda didn’t say Alesha gave her advice. She didn’t say Alesha had the right words, or sent the perfect card, or knew how to fix anything. She said Alesha was there. Through the difficult times. Quietly. Reliably. Without a script.
That’s rare. And it’s rare for a reason most people don’t want to admit.
When someone we love loses a child, or a marriage, or a parent, or a version of themselves they can’t get back, our nervous systems go into a kind of low-grade panic. We feel their pain in our own bodies and we can’t tolerate it. So we do something. We problem-solve. We send the meal train link. We say, “everything happens for a reason.” We disappear for a few weeks and tell ourselves we’re “giving them space.”
In my office I see this same dynamic play out between partners constantly. One person is in pain. The other person, who genuinely loves them, cannot bear to sit with that pain. So they fix, advise, distract, minimize, or quietly retreat. And the person in pain learns, sometimes for life, that their grief is too much for the people closest to them.
What Alesha appears to have done, and what makes Amanda’s tribute land so hard, is the opposite. She stayed close to the pain without trying to make it smaller. That is a skill. It is also a form of love most adults never learn.
Let’s be honest about why this is so hard. When a friend or partner is in unbearable pain, being near them confronts you with two things you’d rather not feel: your own helplessness, and your own awareness that this could happen to you.
