Coffee Stories
Love. Loss. Tangle
Tangle (noun/verb — but mostly, a truth)
The way love and loss refuse to arrive separately. The knot in your chest that is grief and gratitude and memory and hope, all wound together so tightly you can’t pull one thread without feeling all the others.
We are expected to grieve, and then we are expected to be finished grieving. As if love follows a schedule. As if loss has a deadline.
We expected it to be clean — sadness over here, moving forward over there. We thought we could grieve a person, a marriage, a friendship, a version of ourselves and then be done with it. Sorted. Filed away.
But that’s not how it arrives.
It arrives at 4:44 in the morning, heavy and uninvited. It arrives alongside excitement and dread and love so old it has roots you can’t see anymore. It arrives tangled up with practical realities you feel guilty for even thinking about. And it doesn’t apologize for the mess it makes.
Here’s what I know now, finally, in a season of life where I have enough stillness to actually hear it: I have grieved before. The end of a marriage. Lost friendships. Jobs that took pieces of me when they ended. But I was always moving — always in survival mode — and grief had to chase me. It never quite caught up.
This time, it has room. And that changes everything.
The exhaustion that doesn’t match your sleep. The concentration that slips away. The heaviness that settles in your chest without a clean explanation. That isn’t weakness. That is grief finally being given a place to land.
And here is the part nobody tells you: you can hold joy and sorrow in the same two hands at the same time. You can love someone completely and also feel the complicated weight of what comes after. Love and loss don’t organize themselves into tidy separate boxes. They land all at once, all tangled together.
That’s not selfishness. That’s the full, honest weight of being human.
There is something beautiful and brave about letting yourself sit with the weight. Not fixing it. Not pivoting to the to-do list. Not rescuing yourself from the feeling.
Just sitting with it.
So this morning, I’m not trying to untangle it. I’m just sitting with it. Letting it be what it is.
Love. Loss. Tangle.
Some mornings, naming the knot is enough. ☕
My word stack for today:
Love + Loss + Tangle
Love, [luhv] noun, Origin: Old English, “lufu.” The thread that runs through everything. The reason you show up, stay, grieve and begin again. Love comes first. It always does.
Loss, [laws] noun, Origin: Old Norse “los,” meaning loosening or dissolution. Not just what is gone but the disappearance of every ordinary routine that quietly held it.
Tangle, [tang-guhl] noun/verb, Origin: Middle English, likely from Swedish dialect “taggla,” meaning to disorder or disarrange. When love and loss arrive together, wound so tightly you can’t pull one thread without feeling all the others.
These mugs are part of our Coffee Stories collection – word stacks inspired by my personal journey shared in these posts. Each memoir piece becomes a stackable memory you can hold in your hands. Start your own collection and create combinations that speak to your journey.
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A few things that make my Saturday morning sanctuary special:
☕ Coffee Warmer – [Amazon Link] – Never let your coffee go cold again
🛋️ Heated Blanket – [Amazon link] – Lightweight warmth for cozy mornings. This is on my couch!
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