I didn’t realize how much I needed a friendship untouched by history and shared grief. I love my friends, and my family is everything to me, but our relationships are so much more complex in the wake of Allie’s death. The combination of their own grief and their concern for me makes those relationships feel heavy and sometimes fraught, even two years later. I wasn’t looking for a friend, but Jo just inserted herself right into my life, and I’m grateful for it, even if I sometimes don’t know exactly what to do with her and her enthusiasm for everything. She makes me feel normal for the first
...more
