Empathy.

Have you ever read or heard something and the words somehow perfectly express a feeling or emotion that you've never fully been able to articulate? Well, that happened when I came across this article. I felt compelled to share - not because I am particularly sad or angry or emotional about my mom's passing at this very moment. But because I've never seen in writing a more spot on expression of the experience of losing a parent.

http://www.vulture.com/2012/09/mindy-kaling-mindy-project.html

“My relationship with my mom is really the single most profound relationship that I’ve ever had in my life,” she tells me. “By the way, it seems like I’m … I’m just blowing my nose. It’s not because I’m sad.” She has allergies and a cold, she promises. But her voice breaks when she starts talking about how she sat down with a pen and paper and asked her mother to give her all the advice she could possibly give her before she died, and Kaling realized she’d never be able to ask her mother for advice again. “I said to her, ‘Mom, I’m going to be so lonely without you.’” She’s crying now but keeps going. “And she just said, ‘You have to be your own best friend. If you always remember that, you will always have someone there with you.’”

 

One gets the sense that Kaling hasn’t given herself a chance to grieve, nor does she really want the chance. “Maybe I’ll be able to look back in a couple of years and understand,” she says. If she gets too reflective, she’ll get bogged down in sadness and anger thinking about how much her mother would have loved what was happening to her right now. “I like to move forward … I don’t know how much it would help for me to think about things too much. It just seems so fucking unfair. So I get on my elliptical machine and listen to some Rihanna and try to forget about this bullshit.”