Marina Jo's Place

When my mind needs a jolt of emotion — usually hope — I have a few videos I return to like touchstones. They ground me. Reset me. Among them, two stand out: Jill Scott’s 2014 commencement speech at Temple University and Andrew Garfield’s interview with Stephen Colbert in 2021, where he speaks candidly about grief and the loss of his mother.

Jill’s words are full of warmth and vision — like someone handing you both a mirror and a lantern. But it’s Garfield’s words that I return to most often when I’m feeling the weight of loss. They never fail to land.

He says a line that lives with me:

“This is all the unexpressed love, the grief that will remain with us until we pass because we never get enough time with each other, right? No matter if someone lives until 60, 15 or 99.”

There’s something so tender and true in that. Grief, reframed not as an enemy, but as love that didn’t get the full stretch of time it deserved. It’s an idea that makes me feel, strangely, less sad. Or maybe more comforted in the sadness — that it’s not emptiness I’m feeling, but evidence. Of connection. Of meaning.

Lately, I’ve noticed how many people I know are navigating loss. Not just of loved ones, though that is heartbreak enough. But also the loss of dreams, of roles we thought we’d play, of versions of life that didn’t pan out.

We grieve people, yes. But also expectations. Fantasies. Futures we imagined but didn’t get to live.

And all of that — the pain, the aching, the quiet moments of disbelief — is what makes us human. That kind of grief doesn’t always announce itself loudly. It arrives in waves, sometimes subtle, sometimes suffocating. But it’s also a sign we’re awake. That we’re in the world, fully, not sleepwalking through a simulation.

So as we end another week, I want to say this — especially to anyone who’s feeling broken, heavy or hollow:

If you’ve experienced a loss that makes it hard to move forward, please know: It won’t always feel this sharp. It does get better. Slowly. Imperfectly. But it does.

And your grief? That’s not weakness. That’s proof of your capacity to love. It’s evidence that you’re still here, still caring, still trying. And that is nothing short of beautiful.