A Whole Life, not Interrupted

 


Sometimes when I think about Jess, I feel the ache of all the things the world never got to see in her: the ideas she was growing, the future she was already leaning toward. I look at her photographs and I see a young woman right at the edge of launching. Something in me whispers that this future would certainly make a large mark on the world.

​It is easy to fall into that place where a life is measured only by the chapters that never got written, the plans that were interrupted. I tell myself the world missed out on Jess, and that thought cinches inside my chest like a fist I cannot unclench.

​This heavy feeling lifted slightly when Rob and I talked recently. He helped me see something I had not quite named before. I realized I was looking at her life through the ache of everything she did not get to do, and that made her story feel unfinished in my mind. When I soften that lens, I see that she was already complete. Her life held its own fullness, a wholeness that existed regardless of what came next.

​That realization echoed a truth whispered to me in a dream a few years ago, startling me awake with its clarity. I was standing in a room with Beyoncé (of all people!), and we were talking about success. I confessed that sometimes I feel like I have not worked hard enough for the good things in my life. That success must require constant striving. Constant motion. Constant proof.

​She looked at me with a kind of deep sadness and said, "You still think you have to do something to be here."

​The truth of those words settled inside me, and I still haven't fully taken them to heart. ​I still live as if I must earn my place. Earn my joy. Earn my belonging. I must keep proving myself worthy of the air I breathe. And I realize now that I had been placing that same heavy burden onto Jess, as if her life only matters because of what it might have become. As if she has something left to prove

​But she does not. None of us do.

​A life is measured not by its length or its list of accomplishments, but by the love it gave and the love it sparked in others. Jess gave so much of herself while she was here. She lived a life that radiated outward. That kind of presence is not incomplete. It is a complete offering.

​What if the truth is simpler than we want to admit? What if being here is enough? What if the gift is not what we do with our time, but how honestly we inhabit it?

​I am learning, slowly, to be here now. To breathe into this moment without asking it to earn its place. To honor Jess without placing expectations on the future she did not get to live. To remember that she was whole. And I am whole. And her story is not smaller because it was shorter. It is simply hers. Loved. Bright. Complete in ways I am still learning to understand.

​Maybe the world missed out on the future she was building. Perhaps it did not. Because the truth is, she is still shaping me. She is shaping the people who love her. She is shaping the work I do and the way I believe in gentleness and connection. She is still here in the way love continues to ripple forward.
​So I return to that moment in my dream, where Beyoncé offered a truth my waking mind had forgotten. You do not have to do anything to be here.

​And neither did Jess.

​We are here. We are loved. We are enough.

​I am going to keep trying to live from that place. And when I think of Jess now, I will try to see her life not as something interrupted, but as something that bloomed exactly as it was meant to. A whole life. A true life. A life that continues to matter in every heart she touched.