Soft Endings

After years of avoiding COVID, I finally got it.

And while the illness itself was scary, especially when my blood pressure started dropping just from walking across the house, what stayed with me afterward was how quickly I started worrying about everything I wasn’t doing.

The podcast was behind. Laundry was piling up. My business still existed. And even though I knew my body was actively fighting an illness, some part of me still wanted to call those days “unproductive.”

In this episode of Soft Endings, I talk about the grief of losing the illusion of safety from COVID, the strange social denial surrounding a virus that’s still harming people, and the internalized ableism that tells us rest needs to be justified.

I also reflect on fluctuating capacity, what temporary illness made me notice about the assumptions we make about disabled and chronically ill bodies, and why “healing is productive” might not actually be the liberation it sounds like.

Maybe healing doesn’t need to prove its usefulness.

Maybe some days just count because we lived them.

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What happens when the story you built your life around stops making sense?

In this episode, I explore a kind of grief I don’t hear people talk about very often—the grief of watching the future you were promised slowly fall apart.

This isn’t an episode about politics as much as it is about disillusionment. It’s about growing up believing that hard work would lead to stability, then realizing that many of us are doing everything “right” and still struggling to imagine a future that feels secure.

From my own experience in Atlanta, to growing up in Tuskegee, to my work as a death doula, I explore what happens when institutions stop feeling dependable—and why community has always been the quiet foundation beneath them.

Maybe grief isn’t only about losing people.

Maybe it’s also about losing the stories we thought would carry us.

And maybe, when those stories end, they invite us to remember something much older.

Thank you for listening.

Soft Endings is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

How do two people share years of ordinary life together and still leave with completely different understandings of each other?

This episode began with a question I couldn’t shake after the end of my longest relationship. I wasn’t just grieving the relationship itself. I was grieving the realization that the person walking away seemed to be carrying a version of me that felt almost unrecognizable.

That question led me somewhere unexpected.

Why do relationships begin with so much curiosity, but often end with certainty? At what point do we stop updating the portraits we carry of one another?

In this episode, I explore the grief of accepting that none of us can ever be fully known—not because we aren’t honest, but because every person remembers, interprets, and carries a different version of us.

We talk about memory, intentions, family, identity, legacy, and the quiet courage it takes to stay curious about the people we love.

If this conversation resonated with you and you’re navigating grief, caregiving, or the changing shape of relationships, this is the work I offer through MavenHaven.

What do you do when someone becomes part of your grief… and you still love them anyway?

Our culture tells us there are only two acceptable endings: if someone hurt you, you should hate them. If you still love them, you should go back.

But what if neither is true?

In this episode, I explore one of the loneliest and least-talked-about forms of grief: the transformation of love after relational hurt. We untangle the differences between understanding and excusing, forgiveness and reconciliation, love and access, and hope and responsibility.

This isn’t an episode about staying in harmful relationships.

It’s about what happens after you’ve already left—and discover your heart didn’t stop loving just because the relationship ended.

If you’ve ever felt ashamed for still caring about someone who hurt you, this conversation is for you.

Sometimes growth arrives too late.

Long after the breakup.Long after the friendship ends.Long after the conversation you wish you’d had.

This week, I’m reflecting on seeing someone from my past for the first time in years, the uncomfortable humanity of Beef Season 2, and a kind of grief we rarely talk about: the grief of realizing we’ve hurt someone we loved.

What happens when accountability is real, but repair is no longer possible?

How do we carry regret without letting it become our identity?

And can we become better people, even if we never get another chance?

This episode explores shame, accountability, restorative justice, self-forgiveness, and the painful reality that some of the most important lessons cost us relationships we wish we’d known how to save.

If you’ve ever replayed an old conversation wishing you knew then what you know now, this one’s for you.

June is supposed to be a month of celebration.

Pride. Juneteenth. Progress. Visibility.

But what happens when the thing we’re celebrating isn’t finished?

In this episode, Chris explores the tension between joy and responsibility, tracing a thread through Pride displays, Juneteenth commemorations, Frida Kahlo merchandise, and the stories we tell ourselves about social progress.

Together, we’ll ask what happens when movements become symbols, when celebrations become evidence that the work is done, and what it might look like to celebrate without forgetting the people still carrying the struggle.

This isn’t an argument against joy.

It’s an invitation to stay connected.

Because the fight didn’t end.

We just started throwing a party.

What if grief isn’t love with nowhere to go?

After watching Is God Is and spending a weekend supporting a family through an end-of-life transition, I found myself questioning one of the most common phrases about grief.

Because grief doesn’t always look like sadness.

Sometimes it looks like laughter in a hospital room.

Sometimes it looks like anger.

Or relief.

Or storytelling.

Or a cup of coffee when there’s nothing left to fix.

In this episode, I explore the idea that grief may be less of a destination and more of a crossroads—a place where love encounters change and takes on new forms.

We talk about complicated relationships, hospice, revenge stories, Alua Arthur’s challenge to the phrase “grief is love with nowhere to go,” and the question I’ve been carrying lately:

What is grief trying to grow?

This week, Chris talks about a grief many people might dismiss at first glance: grieving a video game.

But this episode isn’t really about gaming.

Using Destiny as the emotional anchor, this episode explores ambiguous loss, third spaces, fandom, identity, ritual, online communities, and the very human grief that can happen when something meaningful changes instead of fully disappearing.

From weekly rituals and late-night raids to homebound community connection and the emotional architecture of belonging, this is an episode about the kinds of grief that don’t always receive public permission—but still matter deeply.

Because not everything meaningful leaves a body behind.

Topics include:

Destiny and live-service grief

ambiguous loss

disenfranchised grief

online community and identity

third spaces

fandom and belonging

grief for changing relationships and futures

ritual, continuity, and emotional attachment

A recent virus headline made my body react before my brain had fully caught up.

Not because I thought I was in immediate danger.

Because some things don’t register as information. They register as memory.

In this episode of Soft Endings, I’m talking about unresolved collective trauma, COVID grief, nervous system memory, and what happens when something changes us collectively—but we’re expected to process it mostly alone.

This isn’t a public health episode.

It’s a grief episode.

About disrupted rituals. Fractured trust. Isolation. Survival mode. The pressure to “move on.” And the strange feeling of realizing your body may still be carrying something the world never really made space to process.

If you’ve ever had a “not again” reaction to a headline, this one’s for you.

Some things get passed down in recipes.

Jewelry.

Family cheekbones.

And some things get passed down as habits, instincts, and survival strategies so old they start to feel like personality.

In this episode of Soft Endings, I’m exploring the grief of realizing that some of what people raised inside girlhood inherit may not be universal truth—but adaptation.

The “good girl.”

The therapist friend at fifteen.

Being “mature for your age.”

Learning to monitor your body, your tone, your safety, everybody else’s emotions.

And the harder truth: we may never fully know where survival ended and authenticity began for the people who came before us—or even for ourselves.

This isn’t an episode about blaming mothers.

It’s about tenderness.

Complexity.

And gratitude for the people who survived enough to hand us more room.

If you’ve ever wrestled with inherited expectations around femininity, emotional labor, safety, desirability, or simply what it means to become yourself—this one’s for you.