Hi, I'm Jessica Porter, and welcome back to Sleep Magic, a podcast where I help you find the magic of your own mind, helping you to sleep better and live better.

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Thank you everyone for being here.

I'm going to cut to the chase tonight

because the topic is a big one.

Handling Loss A big one. Handling loss.

I've recently lost a friend,

someone I loved and with whom I spent some very interesting and formative years.

We had some real adventures together.

And now with him gone, I feel sad. And it's strange that I'm the only one carrying our memories around.

Losing someone is weird.

There's also a pain in me that touches off all sorts of other pains buried inside and is being brought up these days by the most random scene in a movie.

I'm feeling loss, the most human of feelings.

A sweet, strange, an awful void down which we are all pulled now and again.

Which brings me to all the big thoughts one has at times like these.

I used to volunteer for hospice when I was in my 20s, so I was up close to loss and death.

And then I spent a lot of my 30s helping people have babies.

And I remember thinking,

we spend most of our lives playing the middle keys of the piano doing our lives,

achieving our goals, having our adventures.

But then there are these other keys of the piano. On either side of the middle, at the bottom and the top of the keyboard, they play different sounds and make us have different feelings.

We don't play them all the time, but there they are.

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