When my mother died, I didn't just lose my best friend—I lost my compass. She gave me her only working car so I could go to college. She taught me about compassion and showed me how systems fail the most vulnerable. And when she was gone, I had no idea how to exist in a world without her. In this episode, my friend and I share our stories of losing our parents and the profound isolation that followed. We talk about church communities that meant well but offered spiritual bypassing instead of support, the complex emotions from family members grieving differently, learning to articulate what we needed when we didn't even know ourselves, and the slow journey from surviving grief to actually living with it. This isn't a conversation about "moving on" or "closure"—it's about how love continues, how grief transforms, and why healing happens in communit ...