The Life We Don't Get Back Journal Entry #8

Molly’s Journal Entry #8

Food for Thought. Wine for Wonder.

THE LIFE WE DON’T GET BACK

On loss, memories, the darkness in this world, and the beautiful, terrifying privilege of being alive.

I’ve been having some strange dreams lately.

The kind that stay with you long after you’ve opened your eyes. People you haven’t seen in years. Places you haven’t thought about. Feelings you were certain you’d tucked away somewhere, never to revisit again.

And then you wake up.

And you wonder.

I’ve been doing a lot of that lately.

Wondering about life. Death. The people we’ve lost. The people we’ve loved. The people who hurt us. The people we may never see again.

Wondering why the world can be so incredibly beautiful and so terribly cruel at exactly the same time.

I’m 48 years old.

And lately, that number feels different.

I’m watching people my age battle cancer. I’m hearing about friends and acquaintances dying far too young. Families losing mothers, fathers, husbands, wives. People who had vacations planned, children to raise, dreams to chase.

People who thought they had time.

Just like the rest of us.

And I can’t help wondering what we’re all waiting for.

Because here’s something I’ve come to understand.

My greatest fear isn’t dying.

It’s dying before I’ve really gotten to live.

Before I’ve traveled to the places I’ve dreamed about. Before I’ve spent enough mornings without an alarm clock. Before I’ve had enough ordinary evenings sitting around a fire with the man I love.

Before I’ve actually enjoyed this life I’ve worked so incredibly hard to build.

And maybe that’s why all these memories have been finding their way back to me.

Because I’ve lived a lot of different lives within these 48 years.

Some beautiful.

Some heartbreaking.

And some that, looking back, hardly feel like they belonged to me at all.

The strange things we carry

Memories are funny things.

A song comes on, and suddenly you’re twenty years younger. You remember a place, a person, a feeling. Maybe you smile. Maybe your heart aches. Maybe you turn the song off.

You think about traveling somewhere you’ve been before, somewhere beautiful, but wonder whether the memories attached to that place will follow you there.

Sometimes a memory is a gift.

Sometimes it’s something you wish you could give back.

I’ve looked death in the face.

I was young when my kidneys shut down because of a drug. Young enough that dying wasn’t supposed to be something I had to think about.

I’ve experienced sexual violence. Abuse. Betrayal. Financial devastation. Losing everything and starting over.

I’ve trusted people who didn’t deserve my trust. I’ve been taken advantage of in relationships, friendships, love, and business. I’ve made mistakes of my own, some enormous ones.

And I’ve survived things that I still struggle to believe actually happened to me.

There’s a younger woman I sometimes think about who was so frightened, so controlled, and so desperate to be loved that she slowly stopped being herself.

She tried to be thinner. Quieter. Prettier. More agreeable. Less of whatever someone else decided was too much.

She lived in fear of saying the wrong thing, laughing too loudly, or simply enjoying herself.

And when I think about her now, I almost feel as though I’m remembering someone else’s life.

How could that have been me?

The same feeling comes when I remember a terrifying night in New Orleans.

Sometimes that memory feels like a scene from a Netflix series. Something awful happening to a woman on a screen.

Except it wasn’t a television show.

And it wasn’t someone else.

It was me, walking back toward my hotel, barely clothed, terrified, disoriented, and trying to understand what had just happened.

I still wonder how a human being can do something so cruel to another.

How someone can look at another person and simply stop seeing their humanity.

And how the person who survives something like that is supposed to make sense of it afterward.

The truth is, sometimes you don’t.

Sometimes you simply keep living.

You go to work. You laugh. You fall in love again. You make dinner. You celebrate birthdays. You build a business.

And years later, something reminds you.

And for a moment, you’re right back there.

But here’s what I want anyone reading this to understand.

What happened to you is not who you are.

And the person you were when you were simply trying to survive deserves compassion, too.

It took me a very long time to understand that.

The people we lose without saying goodbye

The other day, I had the privilege of speaking to a group of high school students about owning a business, taking chances, making mistakes, and finding their own way in this world.

I looked out at those young faces, so full of possibility.

And somewhere in the middle of it all, I thought about a boy I once helped raise.

My former stepson.

For six years, I was part of his life. I wanted so badly to be a mother, to build a family, to love and belong.

And whatever else was happening in that chapter of my life, the love I had for that child was real.

I wonder about him sometimes.

Who he’s becoming. What he believes. Whether he remembers those years the way I do.

I wonder why he hasn’t reached out, although I understand how complicated family relationships can become, especially when a child grows up surrounded by someone else’s version of a story.

I don’t blame him.

I just wonder.

And I miss the idea of knowing who he became.

That’s another kind of loss, isn’t it?

Losing someone who is still very much alive.

Losing a family you thought you’d have forever.

Losing a friendship you believed was genuine.

Losing the person you once were.

Losing years you can never get back.

We talk so much about grieving the dead, but not nearly enough about grieving the living.

The people who are out there somewhere, living their lives, while a little piece of your heart still remembers them.

You can know that walking away from something was the right decision and still mourn what you left behind.

You can be grateful for the life you have today and still feel sadness for the life you once imagined.

Both things can be true.

And perhaps that’s one of the hardest things about being human.

We don’t get to choose which memories stay.

Why?

I’ve been asking that question a lot lately.

Why?

Why does cancer take someone who should have had another thirty years?

Why do good people suffer?

Why do people hurt the very people who love them?

Why do we manipulate, threaten, abuse, and take advantage of one another?

Why do we spend so much energy trying to change other people instead of simply allowing them to be themselves?

I turn on the news and see families suffering. People being treated terribly because they look different, believe differently, love differently, or simply want a different life.

And sometimes I wonder what on earth is happening to us.

When did cruelty become so easy?

When did disagreement become permission to humiliate someone?

When did we forget that the person standing across from us has an entire life we know absolutely nothing about?

Even in my own little corner of the world, I’ve experienced how unkind people can be when you decide to change something.

When I took over the restaurant and began making it my own, some people were angry.

Particularly some cyclists who had loved what existed before.

I understand nostalgia. I understand loving a place and wishing it could stay exactly the same.

But I struggled to understand the bullying, the comments, the personal attacks.

Why should following my dream make someone else so angry?

You don’t have to love my restaurant. My food. My wine. My decisions.

But why can’t we disagree without trying to hurt one another?

I spent years of my life trying to become the person someone else wanted me to be.

I’m not interested in spending the rest of it doing the same thing.

And I don’t believe anyone else should have to, either.

We are allowed to change our minds. Our careers. Our circumstances. Our dreams.

We are allowed to grow.

But we should never have to make ourselves smaller simply to make someone else comfortable.

I wonder how much happier this world would be if we spent less time trying to control one another and more time trying to understand one another.

Because you never know what someone has survived just to be standing in front of you.

The things we don’t get back

I’ve lost people I would give absolutely anything to spend one more afternoon with.

Not even a special occasion.

Just an ordinary Tuesday.

A conversation. A laugh. A hug. One more chance to ask a question I didn’t know I’d someday wish I’d asked.

I think about all the years I spent working.

Always another shift. Another obligation. Another reason I couldn’t make it to dinner or spend the afternoon with family.

There would always be another holiday.

Another birthday.

Another Christmas.

Until there wasn’t.

And that’s the part of death that breaks my heart.

We don’t just lose the people we love.

We lose all the moments we thought we still had with them.

The conversations that will never happen. The trips we never took. The things we never said because we assumed there would be more time.

And there is absolutely nothing we can do to get those moments back.

No amount of money.

No amount of success.

No amount of wishing.

I’ve worked hard my entire life. Sometimes because I wanted to succeed. Sometimes because I had no other choice. Sometimes because working was easier than dealing with everything else.

And I’m proud of what I’ve built.

But lately I’ve been asking myself a difficult question.

Am I so busy building a beautiful life that I’m forgetting to live it?

There’s always another menu. Another event. Another bill. Another problem to solve.

Another person who needs something.

Another reason to say, “We’ll do that next year.”

But what if next year doesn’t come?

What if the trip we keep postponing is the trip we never get to take?

What if the people we’re working so hard for are the very people we’re forgetting to spend time with?

I don’t want to look back someday and realize I spent my whole life preparing to enjoy it.

I want to enjoy it now.

I want to travel with Brad. Ride our motorcycles down roads we’ve never explored. Find little towns with absolutely no agenda.

I want to sit around a fire, listen to music, and not feel guilty that I’m not accomplishing something.

I want more adventures with Horse.

More mornings when I don’t know what time it is.

More dinners where I’m actually sitting at the table instead of cooking for everyone else.

I want to be a good wife. A good friend. A good human being.

And I want to have the time to actually be those things.

Because the work will never be finished.

And enjoying our lives shouldn’t be something we have to earn.

The beautiful part of still being here

For all the darkness I’ve experienced and witnessed, there’s something I refuse to give up.

My belief in people.

I know there are terrible things happening in this world.

I’ve experienced some of them firsthand.

But I also know there is extraordinary goodness.

I see it every day at Molly’s.

When strangers become friends over dinner. When people gather to help someone who’s struggling. When a guest thanks one of my employees. When someone walks through our doors carrying the weight of the world and leaves with a smile.

I often wonder about the people sitting in those chairs.

Maybe the woman at table twelve is going through the worst year of her life.

Maybe the man sitting at the bar just lost someone he loves.

Maybe the couple celebrating their anniversary has survived something nobody else in the room knows about.

Maybe the person who seems difficult or impatient is simply having a day when being human feels especially hard.

I don’t need to know their stories to treat them with kindness.

I just need to remember that everybody has one.

And maybe that’s why hospitality means so much more to me than food and wine.

Because I know what it feels like to be afraid.

I know what it feels like to be invisible.

I know what it feels like to desperately need someone to be kind.

And if I can give another human being a couple of hours where they feel welcomed, respected, cared for, and genuinely happy, then I think I’ve done something worthwhile.

Not because everything terrible that happened to me happened for a reason.

I don’t believe that.

Cruelty doesn’t need to happen to teach us compassion.

People shouldn’t have to suffer to deserve kindness.

But I do believe we get to decide what we do with the life we have left.

And I choose to make something good with mine.

Still wondering

I don’t have some grand answer to all these thoughts.

Maybe that’s why I write.

Because I’m still trying to understand this extraordinary, heartbreaking, beautiful, sometimes terrifying thing called life.

I wonder about death.

I wonder about the people I’ve lost.

I wonder about the people I’ve loved who are still out there somewhere.

I wonder why some people survive things others don’t.

I wonder why a young woman can lose her kidneys, why someone can be raped or abused, why cancer can steal a life, why mental illness can steal someone’s hope, and why the world can be so cruel to people who are simply trying to find their way.

I wonder how many people are quietly carrying things they never talk about.

And I wonder how much kindness could change if we simply remembered that.

I want to believe there’s something beyond this life.

That the people we’ve lost aren’t simply gone.

That somehow, somewhere, the love we shared doesn’t just disappear.

I can’t prove any of that.

But I have to leave room for the possibility.

Because I can’t quite accept that this is all there is.

That we come into this world, work ourselves to exhaustion, love people, lose people, collect memories, and then one day simply disappear.

There has to be more.

Or at least, I hope there is.

And until I find out, I want to make this life count.

Not by working harder.

Not by being more successful.

Not by making everybody happy or trying to become someone they think I should be.

But by living.

Really living.

By loving the people who love me back.

By walking away from people who mistake kindness for weakness.

By standing up for those who are being mistreated.

By forgiving myself for the years I didn’t know how to do those things.

By remembering that the woman I used to be, the frightened one, the brokenhearted one, the one who stood in the snow with a suitcase and almost nothing else, is part of the reason I’m standing here today.

I survived.

I’m okay.

And I know not everyone gets to say that.

That’s something I don’t take lightly.

Today, I have a husband who loves the actual woman I am. A ridiculous dog who makes our house feel like home. A restaurant with my name on it. Friends who show up. A life that is far from perfect but finally feels like mine.

And perhaps that’s what all these dreams and memories are reminding me.

That I have already lost enough time trying to be someone else.

That I don’t need to lose any more waiting for permission to be happy.

That the people we love won’t always be here.

And neither will we.

So take the trip.

Call the friend.

Sit by the fire a little longer.

Listen to the song, even if it makes you cry.

Make the memory.

Be kind to the stranger.

Let people be who they are.

And please, don’t spend your precious life trying to convince someone else that you’re worthy of being loved exactly as you are.

Because you are.

I don’t know how many years I have left.

None of us do.

But when my time comes, I don’t want to look back and see a woman who spent her whole life surviving.

I want to see a woman who finally allowed herself to live.

One who loved deeply. Laughed loudly. Took chances. Made mistakes. Stood up for herself. Saw the world. Helped people. And never again apologized for being exactly who she was.

I want to recognize her.

And I want to know she was happy.

Because we don’t get this life back.

Not the beautiful parts.

Not the painful parts.

Not the ordinary Tuesdays we didn’t realize would someday mean everything.

And while I may never stop wondering why this world can be so dark, I refuse to let that darkness take away my desire to find the light.

There’s still so much goodness left to discover.

So much love left to give.

So much life left to live.

And I’m still here.

Still wondering.