Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed

like she can’t get out of bed or is struggling with depression. She has a great life. One of her friends calls her “joy on wheels” and that’s accurate, but I know it isn’t the whole story. Her mom’s death is always lurking. It comes up on a regular basis. When she cries or talks about how much she misses her mom, I’m supportive, but I usually feel insufficient. I don’t know what to say beyond lame things like “I’m sorry” and “I can imagine how you’d feel” (though I can’t because my mom is still alive). She never had much of a relationship with her dad, who left the picture a long time ago, and she and her sister aren’t very close, so I can’t rely on someone in her family to be there for her. Sometimes I try to cheer her up or try to get her to forget about “the heavy stuff,” but that usually backfires and only makes her feel worse
.
    I don’t know how to handle this, Sugar. I feel lame in the faceof her grief. I know you lost your mother too. What can you tell me? I want to be a better partner when it comes to handling grief
.
    Signed,
Bewildered
    Dear Bewildered,
    Several months after my mother died I found a glass jar of stones tucked in the far reaches of her bedroom closet. I was moving her things out of the house I’d thought of as home, but that no longer was. It was a devastating process—more brutal in its ruthless clarity than anything I’ve ever experienced or hope to again—but when I had that jar of rocks in my hands I felt a kind of elation I cannot describe in any other way except to say that in the cold clunk of its weight I felt ever so fleetingly as if I were holding my mother.
    That jar of stones wasn’t just any jar of stones. They were rocks my brother and sister and I had given to our mom. Stones we’d found as kids on beaches and trails and the grassy patches on the edges of parking lots and pressed into her hands, our mother’s palms the receptacle for every last thing we thought worth saving.
    I sat down on the bedroom floor and dumped them out, running my fingers over them as if they were the most sacred things on the earth. Most were smooth and black and smaller than a potato chip.
Worry stones
my mother had called them, the sort so pleasing against the palm she claimed they had the power to soothe the mind if you rubbed them right.
    What do you do with the rocks you once gave to your dead mother? Where is their rightful place? To whom do they belong? To what are you obligated? Memory? Practicality?Reason? Faith? Do you put them back in the jar and take them with you across the wild and unkempt sorrow of your twenties or do you simply carry them outside and dump them in the yard?
    I couldn’t know. Knowing was so far away. I could only touch the rocks, hoping to find my mother in them.
    Not long before my mother died, a friend told me a story about a woman she knew, a resident at the group home for those with brain injuries where my friend worked. Several years before, the woman had been attacked as she walked home from a party. Her head hit the sidewalk so hard in the course of the assault that she’d never be the same again. She was incapable of living alone, incapable of so very much, and yet she remembered just enough of her former life as a painter and teacher that she was miserable in the group home and she desperately longed to return to her own house. She refused to accept the explanations given to her as to why she couldn’t. She had come to fervently believe that in order to be released she had only to recite the correct combination of numbers to her captors, her caretakers.
    93480219072
, she’d say as they fed her and bathed her and helped her get ready for bed.
6552091783. 4106847508. 05298562347
. And on and on in a merciless spiral. But no matter what she said, she would never crack the code. There was no code. There was only the new fact of her life, changed irrevocably.
    In the months after my mother died, I thought of this woman an