🌿 A note for anyone whose phone is ringing right now and feels like they can’t breathe. If you’re letting calls go to voicemail today — you’re not weak. You’re not avoiding life. You’re not a bad daughter, son, partner, parent, or friend. You’re a person in grief, in trauma, in survival mode — and your body is doing exactly what it should be doing: protecting itself. A ringing phone, to a grieving nervous system, is not a small thing. It’s a knock at the door of a house that’s already collapsing. Every call is one more thing someone wants from you. Every voicemail is one more thread of obligation. And when someone calls 10, 20, 50 times in a row — that’s not concern. That’s pressure. That’s a fire alarm going off inside a body that already can’t breathe. Some truths most people don’t understand: 🌱 You are allowed to turn your phone off. 🌱 You are allowed to take days, weeks, or longer to respond to anyone. 🌱 You are allowed to not explain yourself. 🌱 You are allowed to protect your nervous system, even from people who love you. 🌱 You are allowed to grieve without an audience. If someone in your life is calling you repeatedly and getting upset when you don’t pick up — that’s their inability to sit with discomfort. Not your job to fix. The people who love you well will give you space. The ones who can’t — that’s not love, it’s their need being framed as concern. You can love them and still not pick up. 💬 If you want to share — only if you want to: How is your relationship with your phone right now? Is it loud? Quiet? Off? We hold space for it all here. 💛 — Megan

— ON HOSPICE NURSES 👇 🌿 Let’s talk about hospice nurses. Because nobody else will. If you’ve watched a loved one die, you have probably met a hospice nurse. Maybe more than one. Maybe several over the course of weeks or months. Some of them changed your life. Some of them broke your heart in a good way. And some of them — let’s be honest — were short, cold, distracted, or made an already-impossible moment feel even harder. I want to talk about both. Honestly. Because the conversation around hospice nurses is usually either “they’re angels” or “that one was awful” — and the truth is much more complicated. 💛 BEFORE YOU JUDGE A HOSPICE NURSE Please consider what their job actually looks like: 🕯️ They watch people die. Every day. For years. 🕯️ They are routinely underpaid for the emotional weight of what they do. 🕯️ They are routinely overworked — most hospice nurses have caseloads that are too high. 🕯️ They drive between homes for 10-12 hour shifts, sometimes longer. 🕯️ They are often the ones explaining death to terrified families when nobody else will. 🕯️ They get yelled at by grieving people regularly — and they still come back tomorrow. 🕯️ They lose patients they were attached to. Constantly. With no time to grieve before the next one. Hospice nurses are working in one of the most emotionally devastating environments in the medical field — and most of them aren’t being paid enough, supported enough, or given enough time to process what they witness. Burnout is not the same as being a bad person. A nurse who seems flat, tired, or short on words is not necessarily uncaring. They may be running on fumes after a 60-hour week of holding dying people’s hands. They may have lost three patients in the last week. They may have a sick child of their own at home. They may be one rough shift away from quitting altogether. Before you decide they’re “bitchy,” ask yourself: could I do this job, every day, for years? Most of us couldn’t. They do. ⚠️ THAT SAID — SOME NURSES ARE NOT THE RIGHT FIT

rest in “peace of mind” Dad May 9th., 2026

I’ll go first. I survived cancer, and then learned that surviving comes with its own kind of grief nobody warns you about. The “you should be grateful” grief. The “shouldn’t you be over this by now” grief. The body that doesn’t feel like yours anymore. I’m losing my father slowly, right now, while writing this. And I’m losing him with a backdrop of family who has spent my whole life trying to make sure he believed lies about me before he died. That’s a layered, complicated, ugly grief most people don’t have words for. And under all of it, I’m grieving versions of myself that didn’t survive what I survived. The girl I was before. The trust I had before. The family I thought I had. If you’ve ever been told your grief “doesn’t count” — yours counts. All of it counts. If you’re grieving someone who hasn’t died yet, that’s real grief, and it’s allowed. If you’re grieving a version of yourself, a relationship, a future, a parent who’s still alive but never showed up, you belong here. I’m not “healed.” I’m not on the other side. I’m still in it. I built this community FROM inside it, not from a safe distance after. That’s why I get it. And that’s why this space exists. Your turn, only if you want to: What kind of loss are you carrying? One word, one name, one sentence — whatever feels true. You’re not alone here. 💛 — Megan

Recently I was helping to transition my father from treatment into Hospice at home care. He was then going about twice a week into the hospital during the cold of Buffalo NY winter. I could see that this was becoming less a less of an option by the day. So I was able after some time to talk him into getting the drain put in to his stomach wall that would relieve him and my mother of needing to go the city multiple times a week into the cold and snow and him suffering in immense pain before every draining procedure..I was there when he was onboarded through Hospice and ensured he would finally be on the medication he needed and would actually help him. I took the coming days on where I changed the bottles of fluid and pulled the fluid off his stomach wall when I knew my mother wasn’t sure of herself yet to do so. I’ve helped him comply when he wouldn’t. I’ve sat with him in moments most people couldn’t stomach. And I’ve done it while being painted as the unstable one — by the same family members who spent the previous years making sure I’d be excluded from the will, after being told my entire adult like that I was going to receive half of my fathers share of his inheritance from his father… and also being told I would get things of mine back that I had traded for help in getting a lawyer that the deal was upon his death I would get them all back. So quickly of course things change… and of course I’m not even giving you a 10th of what else has been done to me and how I’ve suffered over the these years and still I’ve tried to help when I could and be there when I shouldn’t but I guess I finally see that none of it mattered anyway because when you have a group of people willing to do everything it takes to make you look bad, unfit, unstable and horrible it’s gonna be damn hard to prove yourself AND WHY BOTHER TRYING ANYWAY. But you still have a feeling of need and want to respond… so you do or don’t and honestly both are ok. That’s the part of caregiving nobody writes about.