Until Our Next Chat
On grief, ritual, and the love that doesn’t end
Content note: This post contains discussion of death, grief, and family loss. Please read gently and take care of yourself.
I’ve been gone longer than I intended.
Not in the quiet, restorative way people sometimes imagine when someone “steps away,” but in the way life sometimes reaches out and grips you by the throat and says, now.
Everything else can wait.
When I left, the plan was simple…if anything in this season could be called that. A one-week trip to Hong Kong to be with my mother-in-law while she was in the hospital. To show up. To sit beside her. To offer whatever comfort presence can offer when words no longer do much.
We scrambled to put everything into place. To arrange for our kids to stay with friends so they can continue going to school. To pack, to book tickets for the 15 hour flight… We left as quickly as we possibly could.
We arrived and didn’t even bother with the hotel. We headed straight for the hospital to be with her.
She passed away twelve hours after we landed, surrounded by her family. We stayed with her until the very last breath.
There is a strange cruelty in timing like that. A disorientation that lingers. You replay the flight in your mind, the hours in the air, the distance, the almosts. We arrived just in time to lose her.
What makes it harder to grasp is how little time we had.
She was diagnosed with stage four cancer around six months ago. Six months to absorb the reality. Six months to try to understand how life could fracture so completely, so quickly. There was no long runway of preparation, no gradual easing into the idea of goodbye. Just shock, followed by acceleration, followed by loss.
What was meant to be a brief visit became something entirely different. A time of mourning. Of ritual. Of family gathering under the weight of grief. My husband and I stayed to help plan her funeral, to participate in traditional Chinese Buddhist ceremonies, to stand beside his family as they moved through the motions that grief demands when the heart hasn’t caught up yet.
Those days moved differently.
Slow and heavy. Sacred and exhausting. Full of incense, offerings, quiet prayers, and moments where time seemed to fold in on itself. Grief was not something hidden away or hurried through. It was acknowledged. Given structure. Given space.
The Buddhist rituals held grief in a way I had never experienced before. Not as something to fix or move past, but as something to sit with. Grief wasn’t treated as a failure of strength. It was treated as a natural response to love. There was reverence in the repetition. Meaning in the stillness. A quiet understanding that love does not end…it changes form. It lingers. It echoes.
I don’t think I came back the same person. Neither of us did.
Something in me shifted. Not abruptly, not dramatically, but in a way that feels permanent. Buddhism itself changed me. Not through doctrine or instruction, but through experience. Through watching how death is honored, how loss is carried collectively, how mourning becomes an act of devotion rather than something to endure in isolation.
My husband’s family-his tribe-changed me too.
Each and every one of them welcomed me with a generosity that transcended language. I didn’t always understand the words being spoken, but I understood the care behind them. The way bowls were placed gently in front of me. The way every meal was shared, and tea was poured. The way hands rested on my shoulder. The way grief was shared so no one bore it alone.
There was something profoundly sacred in that.
I don’t pretend to understand Buddhism fully. I know I have much to learn. But I feel a deep respect for it now…an awareness of its beauty, its spirituality, its ability to offer comfort without demanding explanation. It doesn’t rush grief. It doesn’t ask you to move on. It simply allows you to be where you are.
The chanting during the funeral rituals…hours of it…was especially moving. The cadence. The repetition. The way the sound seemed to weave through the space like something alive. It felt mystical in a way that bypassed intellect entirely. I didn’t need to know the meaning of every word to feel the devotion in them.
It stirred something in me.
Not answers, but curiosity.
A desire to learn. To understand. To approach this spirituality with humility instead of distance. To sit at the edge of something ancient and say, I’m listening.
That curiosity extended to language as well.
Being surrounded by family I couldn’t fully communicate with made something painfully clear: I want to learn Cantonese. Not casually. Not someday. But intentionally…as an act of connection. As a way to better speak to the people who welcomed me so completely. As a way to honor where my husband comes from, and the lineage that shaped him.
Grief has a way of clarifying what matters.
There was one ritual in particular that stayed with me.
I was given the opportunity to write a letter to my mother-in-law…one that would be burned as part of the ceremony. A letter meant not for keeping, but for release. For sending words where hands no longer could.
I wrote everything I wish I had said to her in life.
I thanked her for raising the man I now call my husband…the man who loves me, who stands beside me, who chose to become a stepfather to my children and does so with patience and devotion. I thanked her for the legacy she left behind, not just in blood, but in character. In kindness. In strength. In love that continues to ripple outward.
I told her she was my hero.
I thanked her for the memories. For the smiles. For the warmth she gave to me and to my family, even across distance. For the way her presence could still be felt in the people she shaped.
And most of all, I told her I love her.
I also apologized.
For not reaching out more.
For not saying all the things when time still felt abundant.
For not asking more questions.
For not learning everything I could while we still had the chance.
Writing that letter felt like standing naked in truth…no defenses, no excuses. Just love and regret braided together, honest and unguarded.
When the letter was burned, it was also a transformation. A sending. A trust that what needed to be carried forward would be.
I didn’t say goodbye.
That word felt too final. Too closed.
Instead, I ended the letter with something truer to my heart:
Until our next chat.
Because I don’t believe love ends.
And I don’t believe connection disappears.
And I don’t believe that was the last time my words would reach her.
This experience didn’t just introduce me to loss…it introduced me to a different way of being. One rooted in ritual, reverence, community, and presence. And while I’m still finding my footing inside all of it, I know this much:
I am not the same woman who boarded that plane.
And I don’t think I want to be.
In the days that followed, my husband and I went to the Big Buddha on Lantau Island. We climbed the steps together, breath by breath, leg by leg, surrounded by sky and stone and silence. We spent the day there…not searching for answers, but for steadiness. For something solid enough to lean against when everything else felt like it was slipping.
On another day, my husband took me to Victoria Peak.
I won’t pretend the structures at the top are sacred. They’re glossy, crowded, unmistakably commercial…shopping centers and chain restaurants you could find almost anywhere in the world. But none of that mattered once we stepped beyond them.
At sunset, the view opened up completely.
The ocean stretched out below us, endless and darkening, as the sun dipped toward the horizon and the sky ignited in soft fire. Gold bled into rose. Blue deepened into indigo. I found myself completely still, overcome by a feeling that had nothing to do with spectacle and everything to do with scale.
It felt, briefly, as though the heavens themselves had leaned close enough to touch.
I stood there watching the light change, aware of my smallness, aware of my breath, aware of how grief sharpens beauty until it almost hurts. I knew, even then, that this moment would lodge itself somewhere permanent inside me.
And then night fell.
We walked to the other side of the peak, and the city revealed itself in full. Neon lights ignited one by one, then all at once. Glass towers shimmered. The skyline pulsed with motion and color, electric and unrelenting. It looked like something pulled straight from a cyberpunk film…futuristic, surreal, alive in a way that felt almost defiant.
In one evening, Hong Kong showed me its full spectrum.
Stillness and chaos.
Ancient ritual and relentless modernity.
Grief and wonder coexisting in the same breath.
Grief has a way of sharpening your senses. Of making moments carve deeper grooves into memory. That view….the ocean at dusk, the city at night…will stay with me long after the details of the trip begin to blur.
We also walked through pieces of my husband’s childhood.
Places he loved. Places he hadn’t seen in over a decade. Streets that remembered him even if life had pulled him far away. I watched him become both the man I know now and the boy he once was, layered together in a way that felt intimate and tender and unbearably sad.
This was also the first time I was truly welcomed into his family.
Even though we’ve been married nearly seven years, this was the first time I met so many of them. Aunts. Uncles. Countless cousins. Stories passed across tables. Hands on my shoulder. A quiet, wordless acceptance that arrived not through celebration, but through shared loss.
It was beautiful.
And it was heartbreaking.
We shared meals his mother loved. Dishes chosen with care, out of habit, out of memory. Her seat was empty. The silence where her laughter should have been was deafening. Grief has a way of making absence feel louder than presence ever did.
Writing as a Way Through
Writing has always been how I process the things my body understands before my mind can catch up.
This post is not an announcement. It’s not an update meant to tidy grief into something consumable. It’s a form of breathing. A way of moving emotion through my hands instead of letting it calcify inside my chest.
When I write, I’m not trying to make sense of loss - I’m trying to make room for it.
I’m also writing for connection.
For anyone who knows what it is to love someone deeply and then lose them to cancer. For anyone who understands the cruelty of a diagnosis that arrives late and moves fast. For anyone who didn’t get enough time, enough conversations, enough ordinary days before everything changed.
If that’s you, please know you’re not alone here.
This space has always been about intimacy - not just desire and creativity, but truth. This is part of that truth. Writing is how I heal, how I remember, how I reach outward when grief threatens to fold me inward.
I’m writing this now not to tie any of it up neatly…because there is nothing neat about it… but, to let you know where I’ve been. Why I went quiet. Why the usual rhythms paused.
I didn’t forget this space. Or you.
Life simply asked me to stand somewhere else for a while. To be a wife first. To be family. To be human inside a moment that will forever mark us.
Returning, Gently
As I come back into my work, I’m doing so slowly. Intentionally. With care.
There’s content waiting to be finished, projects that will resume, words that will come again…but I’m giving myself permission to ease back in rather than rush to “catch up.” Grief doesn’t run on schedules, and neither does creativity when it’s rooted in truth.
I’ll be present here again. I’ll share more as I’m able. Some things may arrive softer at first. Others may arrive deeper. All of it will be real.
Thank you for allowing that.
Thank you for not demanding productivity from someone who needed to grieve.
A Quiet Closing Ritual
If you’re carrying grief of your own and don’t know what to do with it right now, here’s a gentle invitation. No obligation. No right way.
Light a candle…or simply imagine one.
Take three slow breaths.
On the first, think of the person you’re grieving.
On the second, think of one ordinary moment you shared.
On the third, allow yourself to feel whatever arrives without trying to name it.
If writing helps you, you might place a few words on the page…unfinished sentences are welcome:
One thing I wish I could say is…
The thing I miss most today is…
If love could travel across time, I would tell you…
You don’t need to reread it.
You don’t need to keep it.
You don’t need to make it beautiful.
Grief doesn’t ask for polish.
It asks for presence.
Some seasons are for creating.
Some are for surviving.
Some are for remembering.
This one has been all three.
🖤 Tiffany
Cancer has taken so much from so many. Please help fund research and find a cure by donating to the American Cancer Society. Every bit helps.
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