The Lie at the Drive-Through
The barista asked if I had anything planned for the day.
I said, “nope”. A lie.
Then as she tried desperately to make small talk and connect with the customer in her drive-through on an early Saturday morning, she asked, “working today?”
“Yup,” came out of my mouth before I could even think. Another lie.
The honest answer was that I was driving toward the hardest thing I'd done in years. The truth was I was about to pick up my cousin, and the two of us were about to drive three hours to say goodbye to another cousin — one who was being taken off life support that afternoon.
I lied twice to a twenty-something kid just trying to make small talk over a coffee order, because I knew if I said the real words out loud — my cousin is dying today, I'm going to go say goodbye to her — I would fall apart in a drive-through lane. And she didn't sign up for that. She just wanted to hand me a latte and get to her next car.
So I smiled. I said no, and I said yes. And I drove away holding the whole truth by myself.
Mary was the next cousin after me. Thirteen months younger. I don't remember the world without her in it - she's just always been there, from the earliest memory I have. My first friend, before I understood friendship was something you could lose.
She was 43. She'd have turned 44 in October. A month after I turn 45.
Mary worked at Menards, lived in a group home, and had an intellectual disability that never once stopped her from building a life she loved — her own job, her own routines, her own people. What none of us knew was that somewhere along the way she'd developed an H. Pylori infection - the kind that usually shows up as heartburn, the kind you can talk yourself out of noticing if heartburn is just something you live with. It turned into an ulcer. The ulcer bled. And by the time anyone realized how much, her body was already in shock.
Two weeks. Two liver failures. Repeated shock. Continuous dialysis that her blood pressure eventually couldn't sustain. Her dad made the call none of us wanted to have to make, and I got in the car to go say goodbye.
She passed at 2am on Sunday.
Here's what I keep coming back to: I didn't lie to that barista because I'm dishonest. I lied because some truths are too heavy to hand to a stranger who didn't ask to carry them. I needed to get through that drive-through, and then through three hours of highway, and then through a hospital room, before I could afford to feel any of it.
That's not weakness, that’s triage.
I'd done this before - held it together in public so I could fall apart later, in private, on my own terms. I did it for months after my dad died, until the grief I kept deferring finally came out sideways, at my husband, over something that had nothing to do with him.
A friend said something to me this week that reframed the whole thing. I told her Mary's death was moving through me faster than my dad's did, faster than my grandma's… and before I could even finish explaining why I thought that was, she stopped me. "That's because you've been here before," she said. "You know the way." (mic drop!)
She’s right. The grief you actually let yourself feel doesn't magically disappear. It becomes a path. The next loss can follow it instead of getting buried under it. But grief you never let yourself feel doesn't disappear either… it just waits, and it grabs onto whatever comes next. It's the same reason you'll see someone completely lose it over a stranger cutting them off in traffic. It was never about the merge. It's every swallowed frustration from months before, all stuck to one small thing, dragged up and detonated at once.
I got to grieve Mary on a path instead of under a pile. And I want to be honest about why, because I don't think it was just maturity. Although I would love to pretend it is. ;)
When my grandma died in 2023 – the last death I experienced before Mary’s - I didn't know any of this yet. I definitely didn't know it when my dad died. But in the time between my grandma and Mary, I trained in neuro-linguistic programming and in something called TIME Techniques, which works with exactly this: the way unprocessed emotion attaches itself to a moment on your timeline and just sits there, waiting, instead of moving through you and clearing. That training is a real part of why this grief had somewhere to go instead of somewhere to get stuck.
So, I want to pause here and say - if any of this is landing for you, if you've noticed your own grief piling up instead of moving, or you've had your own version of losing it over someone cutting you off in traffic - you don't have to just sit with that feeling. There are people trained specifically in this. Look for a practitioner in NLP or TIME Techniques; it's a real, teachable process, not something you have to intuit your way through on your own the way I did the first two times.
Here's something else I keep thinking about: my dad and my grandma didn't just leave a hole. They left me the path to grieve everyone I'll lose after them - because losing people doesn't stop. I'll lose my mom someday. I'll lose more people I love. That's just what it is to love people who are mortal. But I'm not walking into the next one blind. That's the final gift they gave me, one I didn't even know I was receiving at the time. And there’s something really beautiful in that thought for me.
So, if you've lied to a barista, a coworker, a friend on the phone - not to deceive them, but because the truth was too much to say out loud yet – please hear me when I say you're not broken. You're not cold. You're just trying to survive the next ten minutes so you can be present for the ones that actually matter.
The lie isn't the dishonest part. The silence afterward - the part where you never let the truth catch up with you - that's the part worth watching. It's how grief turns into glue instead of a path.
I said goodbye to Mary that day. And for once, grief didn't have to teach me from scratch. It already knew the way in.
What are you carrying today that you haven't said out loud yet? I’m here to be a listening ear if you need it.
