A Letter for the Funerals We Travel To
My Dearest Friend,
Funerals you have to travel to ask something different of you—not because the loss is greater, but because getting there is never assumed, and presence itself becomes something that must be negotiated rather than expected. They are not the kind where you grab your keys and go, or where presence is automatic. They begin instead with a quiet reckoning: before grief is allowed to surface, you must first determine whether you are even able to be there. The questions arrive quickly and practically, pressing in before emotion has room to breathe—can you get the time off, can you afford the flight, can you make it there in time—and suddenly loss is filtered through logistics before it is ever fully felt.
For families who live far from where they come from—especially military families—this is often how grief begins. It starts in leave calendars and airline searches, in weather forecasts and contingency plans, in medical clearances and school schedules, and in the quiet, relentless math of whether a body, a budget, and a job will align well enough to allow you to show up. Long before you can sit with your sadness, you are asked to decide which goodbye you are allowed to have, knowing that distance and duty may mean you cannot have them all.
Do you go earlier, while someone is still alive, holding tight to whatever time remains, even if it means you may not be able to return again, or do you save what you have for the funeral, trusting that love spoken once—by phone, by memory, by instinct—will be enough to carry you through? Even when the choice is made, nothing about it feels certain, and nothing about it feels clean.
I have learned that this kind of grief rarely arrives all at once, and that it often waits for permission to be felt. It waits patiently at the edges of a life already full. It tucks itself behind spreadsheets and packing lists and the steady forward motion of doing what must be done, allowing you to function because you have to—because there are children to care for and obligations to meet and plans that cannot simply be abandoned. I am good at this part. I always have been.
I compartmentalize. I solve. I keep going. The sadness stays contained, carefully managed, until it can no longer be held back, and then it begins to surface sideways—in a shorter fuse, in tears that arrive without warning, in the quiet anger of being overstimulated and overtired while still needing to parent, to perform, to show up as though nothing has shifted beneath your feet. Grief does not disappear when it is postponed; it simply finds other ways to make itself known.
Funerals we travel to also ask us to grieve away from our own spaces, and this, too, carries its own quiet cost. Even when the church is familiar, when the rooms are full of memory, when we have loved those places before, they are no longer ours in the way our bodies need them to be. We find ourselves grieving in borrowed beds and hotel rooms, without our routines, without our comfort food, without the small, grounding anchors that usually hold us steady, learning how to mourn while being guests and how to hold ourselves together in places that cannot fully hold us.
There is a strange dislocation in this, being surrounded by history while no longer being held by home, knowing that the places which once offered comfort now ask something of you instead.
This time, the funeral I am traveling to is for my grandmother, and in many ways, she is part of why this kind of grief feels so familiar to me. She was a military spouse long before I ever knew I would become one, and now I keep her nursing cap beside my grandfather’s Airman service cap on our mantle—not as an inheritance, but as a reflection. I did not grow up knowing I would live a life like hers. It was only later, as a nurse married to an Airman, that the parallel revealed itself, not as destiny but as recognition.
In my earliest years as a military spouse—when deployments were new and frightening and I was learning, in real time, how to parent and hold a household alone—I called her often. She understood what it meant to make daily decisions in the absence of the one you love, to carry responsibility and longing at the same time. Those conversations steadied me, and they rooted me in a lineage of women who had already learned how to live with distance as a constant companion.
Much of my grandparents’ love story had been shaped by distance long before deployments ever entered the picture. They were set up on a blind date and then spent their courtship living on opposite sides of the state, seeing each other only when weekend passes and long drives allowed. My grandfather would leave work on a Friday, drive for hours to see her, stay for little more than a day, and then turn around and drive hours back in order to be at work on Monday morning. The rest of their relationship was carried by letters—first during courtship, and later during their marriage across oceans during the Korean and Vietnam conflicts—a love story written in ink and sent faithfully across miles.
My grandmother kept those letters carefully stacked for decades. No one was allowed to read them while either of them was alive. That was the rule. And when she was dying, my mother sat beside her and read those letters aloud—letters from a young man who always addressed her the same way: my dearest darling. She passed from this life listening to the story of her own love being read back to her, knowing the man who wrote those words had gone ahead of her, and believing, as our family does, that love does not end simply because one life does.
It is only now that I realize something else. When I chose to write in letters—when I opened each one with My Dearest Friend—I thought I was drawing from books I loved, from a teenage devotion to Jane Austen and the careful, intentional language of another era. I did not know, then, that I was echoing something much closer to home, or that I had grown up surrounded by a love story sustained by words, patience, and distance.
As I pack for this funeral, her nursing cap and my grandfather’s Airman service cap are traveling with me. They are not being laid to rest, but brought home for this moment—to be displayed as we say our final goodbye and let her go meet her Airman, before they return with me to their place of honor. There is something quietly fitting in that, too: another journey shaped by distance, by love, and by the careful act of carrying what matters when you can.
I have learned that there is no clean way to do this. If you go, you grieve in motion, in borrowed spaces, aware that the chaos you paused will still be waiting when you return. If you cannot go, the grief often lingers differently, living quietly in the body until something finally makes the absence undeniable. You may regret not going, and you may dread going and go anyway, and you may find yourself holding both at the same time.
None of this means you loved less; It simply reflects the reality of loving people from far away, of doing the best you can inside the limits of a life built by distance and obligation.
If you are packing a bag tonight, canceling a trip, or boarding a flight you wish you did not have to take, I hope you know this: you are not doing this wrong. There was never a perfect answer—only love, and the limits of a life shaped by distance. And sometimes, that is all we are given to carry.
