Dear Y’all: Just Checking On You

Doc Rain
Apr 30
5 min read

Hey Beloved’s,

Are you feeling it? That anxious feeling in the pit of your stomach ? That slow wondering if everything’s gonna be okay ?And as much as I’m thinking about my own life, I often think about the people in my world that I care about. Wondering how life is treating you.

I pay attention. Probably too much. I’ve seen what life has been handing you.

A lot of you have had some unexpected losses. Some painful moments that if I’m being honest, usually impact things like trust. Faith. Hope.

So I wanted to check on you. Heartfully.

And as I’m prone to do, my hope is that I can hand you something that feels inspired. Tender.

Believe me when I say I have no answers. But I wanted you to know that I stand as a witness. That your life matters. That our world matters. That love matters.

I’m gonna be honest with you the way I’m honest with myself on the quiet mornings when nobody’s watching.

The world is heavy right now. Not in the way people say it casually. Like a sigh between conversations. Heavy in the way that finds you staring at the ceiling at 2:30 AM. Being kept awake at the cost of everything. The random and relentless losses. People getting sick in ways that feel uncomfortably familiar. A politic that doesn’t feel like business as usual as much as it feels like something unraveling in slow motion. While we all stand around watching.

And underneath all of it, a quiet discomfort that more hard things are coming despite us already being exhausted.

I feel it. Right there with you.

And if I’m honest, I have been grieving some things quietly.

Four years ago I lost my dog Brooklyn. And I know how that sounds. I know some people will read “dog” and move on. But if you have ever loved an animal the way I loved that dog, you know that what dies is not just a pet. What dies is a particular kind of love. The kind that never had an agenda. Never kept score. Never woke up in a mood that had anything to do with heaviness.

Brooklyn looked at me like I was the whole world. And I looked back at him the same way. There was nothing ever complicated about it. Nothing to negotiate. Just presence.

Just love… doing what love is supposed to do. Quietly, every single day, without making a big deal of itself.

I still see him in my phone. The algorithm keeps surfacing the memories.

Brooklyn in the sun. Brooklyn being silly. Brooklyn chasing the cat. Brooklyn 11 years ago this week.

And the grief comes, but softly now. Like a hand on my shoulder instead of a weight on my chest. Like a song that used to make me cry. That now just makes me close my eyes for a second and remember.

That’s what healed grief feels like, I think. Not gone. Just changed. Still present but no longer in charge.

And I have been thinking about my mother a lot lately. Seventeen years she has been gone. And I still reach for the phone sometimes.

Still have things I want to tell her.

But lately, in this particular season of the world, I catch myself feeling something unexpected alongside the missing. Something that takes me a minute to name. And when I name it, it surprises me.

Relief.

Not because I don’t want her here. God knows I want her here. But because she worked so hard for so long and she deserved her rest. And this world right now, this particular version of things….I am glad she is not carrying it in her body.

I am glad she is somewhere that the news does not reach.

Both things are true at the same time. The missing and the gratitude. The ache and the peace. And I have stopped trying to make them resolve into one clean feeling because they are not going to. They are just going to live together. And I am learning to let them.

Here is what has been saving me. Not in a dramatic way. In the small daily way that really counts.

My dog’s Zen and Yoshi. I have been letting myself receive their love differently. More slowly, like I have time for it. Like I deserve it. And it has been doing something to me that I did not expect. There is a purity in the way an animal loves you that most human relationships spend years trying to approximate.

I am paying attention to it now in a way I wasn’t before.

Walks around the backyard. Just one or two slow loops where each step feels like it means something. Where I look up and the sky is just doing what it always does. Magnificent and indifferent to everything we have made a mess of down here. And something in me releases.

Something remembers that not everything is broken. Not everything is loud. Not everything needs my attention. Or my worry. Or my fixing.

A meal eaten slowly. A song that hits different today than it did last year. A show I’ve been watching that has darkness in it. Real darkness. Loss and addiction and grief woven right into the story. But also has a river running through it.

Trees that don’t know anything about human suffering. So they keep just being trees. And as I watch nature just continue, without my permission, without my participation, without even noticing me really…That reminds me that some of what feels like the end of everything is actually just the end of something. And something else, always, is already growing in the space it left behind.

I am learning to laugh again. The kind of laughter that surprises me. The kind that comes from something small and human and slightly ridiculous and reminds me that joy is stubborn. That it persists. That it will find a crack in the heaviest day and come through it if I let it.

I am also learning, slowly and imperfectly, to have compassion for the people whose darkness spills. The ones whose jokes are rooted in someone else’s pain. The ones who are cruel in the comment sections and loud in the wrong places and small in the moments that call for something bigger.

I do not always get there. But I am trying.

Because I know enough about human beings to know that very few people choose unkindness from a place of wholeness. Mostly people hurt others because they are hurting and this is the only language they have found for it.

That does not make it okay. It just makes it human.

What I want you to know, if you are reading this in a hard moment, is that the beauty is not somewhere else waiting for better conditions. It is here. Right now. Sitting right next to everything heavy. The sky outside your window. The creature who loves you without complication. The memory of someone gone that still makes you smile if you let it. The stranger who held the door. The song that found you at exactly the right moment. The meal. The laugh. The quiet.

None of us gets out of here alive. I mean that with every tender thing in me. We are all just moving through this together, doing the best we can with what we have. Loving imperfectly and being loved imperfectly in return. Finding grace in the smallest places because sometimes that is the only place it fits.