By Kris Ann Valdez 
Sometimes you get lucky with those easygoing friendships. I have that with my friend Amelia. For the past 12 years, we’ve raised our babies together while we sat at each other’s kitchen islands, served tea and coffee (Amelia makes a mean latté), and chatted about everything from bedtime routines to “oh my gosh are we perimenopausal?”
She’s the kind of friend I can text when the kids and I are stir-crazy and need to get out of the house. The kind I can ask on a whim to babysit for me if I have a last-minute obligation. The friend I confess to if I’ve done something ridiculous or my kids are driving me bonkers.
One summer, when her husband was deployed overseas and mine worked crazy hours, we proclaimed Tuesdays our family dinner nights. She made chicken pot pie soup, and I brought homemade biscuits. We sat around her old paint-splattered table she’d rescued from her back alley and filled up on the hearty soup and friendship, each feeling the absence of our missing spouse a little less.
When I got pregnant later that summer, feeling nauseous and exhausted, she’d stop by to bring me homemade muffins and sparkling waters just because. Those little gestures always energized my droopy spirits.
Twice, the military called Amelia’s family away, but those moves were temporary. Six months later, she returned, and we picked up where we left off. Our kids, scootering on the front driveway, making silly home videos, playing with her fostered cats.
This time, when she tells me, “I have news,” I sense it in her serious expression before the words leave her mouth. This time, it’s permanent.
What do you say when you know you’re losing one of your best no-fuss, over-a-decade-old friends to a move? First, it’s your duty to tell them how happy you are for their new grand adventure. But inside, it’s okay to let your heart drop with the news. To feel like someone’s stomping all over it without meaning to. Like you’re a teeny tiny ant under an unassuming boot.
It would be easier to get swept up in your emotions all at once in order to get the grief over with, but this isn’t that kind of beast. Instead, it’s the kind that’ll ram into you at random when you least expect it, like when you can’t reach for the phone and say, “Hey, wanna come over and eat family dinner?” Or on those lonelier days when you long to sit at her table and just chat about nothing and everything.
It’s a grief that must be processed slowly, a little painfully because there will be no more hand-me-downs passed on and secondhand information relayed about random topics you never knew you needed to know.
I can’t say when the grief will go away. But I do know this: I’ve done it before. We have lifelong friends in Montana, Colorado, and other states now. Our opportunities to reconnect are precious. These relationships feel deeper for the effort put in to maintain them when it would be easier to let them fade.
So, yes, I’m not losing my friend, just gaining another destination to visit. Another “let’s catch up” person to call. But what I am losing is the convenience of doing daily life together. And I’m giving myself permission to grieve that.
by Whitney Fleming 
by Brianna Baranowski 
