Michelle Cecile was a middle school choir teacher when her best friend Erica was dying.
She’d been calling in sick for two weeks, spending every evening at Erica’s house during hospice. Picking up whatever needed to be picked up. Making whatever needed to be made. Being there.
When Erica passed away, Michelle called her school to ask if she could use bereavement leave.
The response? “Is she your sister?”
“Well, no.”
“Then you can’t use bereavement time.”
So Michelle said screw it and used her sick time instead. Called in sick every single day. Because being there for her best friend – and then grieving her – was more important than following the rules about what kind of loss “counts.”
But here’s the question that haunts me: Why didn’t it count?
Why does our society have a framework for grieving parents, siblings, spouses, even cousins – but not for the friends who are sometimes closer to us than any blood relative?
Why do we get bereavement leave for family members we barely know, but not for the person who was there through every major life transition, who knew us better than anyone, who was, in every way that matters, family?
Michelle’s story is about a lot of things. But at its core, it’s about this: The friends we choose deserve the same space to grieve as the family we’re born into.
And it’s time we stopped pretending otherwise.
When They Met (And Everything Changed)
Michelle was 19. Erica was 18.
Michelle and her boyfriend walked into a J. JACOBS clothing store (if you’re old enough to remember those), and this skinny blonde came bouncing up to them.
“We’re having a party this weekend, you should totally come!”
Michelle remembers thinking: Who’s this woman? I don’t know her.
But that was Erica. A social butterfly who didn’t need a whole history with someone to call them a friend. “We met that one time? Now we’re friends.” That was just who she was.
The party Erica was inviting them to? It was in the same fourplex where Michelle lived. And later, Erica moved into that same building.
That’s where they became best friends.
“There’s something about being young, 18, 19, you’re on your own, you’re figuring out life, you don’t know what it really is all about,” Michelle told me. “And to have somebody right there by your side who’s going through the same things – trying to figure out schooling, trying to figure out what life looks like as an adult.”
They were messing up together. Learning together. Navigating the rapid-fire learning curve of early adulthood side by side.
“We just clicked,” Michelle said. “There was never a moment where we were like, ‘Should we be friends?’ It was always just like, we were just friends. Period.”
They’d go out and “hit the town” (in their small town, which wasn’t that exciting, but it was theirs). On Friday nights, they’d try to watch movies together, and Erica – who worked full time while Michelle went to school – would always fall asleep.
These are the small moments that define a friendship. The unremarkable, beautiful, ordinary moments that add up to something profound.
The Distance That Didn’t Matter
Life happened, the way it does.
Michelle graduated from college. Erica moved – a lot. She had family in Utah, California, and Oregon. She was always somewhere else.
And this was the late 80s, early 90s. No cell phones. No email. No texting.
Everything they did while Erica lived far away was through cards, letters, and long-distance phone calls, which they had to pay for.
But their friendship didn’t change. When Erica came back to town, they’d pick up right where they left off.
Then came the big life stuff. Michelle had a son as a single mom. Erica was there – wanting to hold the baby, to babysit, to be present.
Then there were marriages. Michelle met her husband (who knew that when he met Erica, if she gave him the thumbs up, he was okay). They were blending families, figuring out what it looked like to mesh their lives together.
They had visions of what their future would look like. This dynamic foursome getting together, doing couple-things, living life side by side.
And then, right around the time Michelle got married, Erica was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma.
There weren’t many years for them to live out that vision.
Before we go further, I need to honor Michelle’s request: Please go get your skin checked. Melanoma is very curable if caught early. We don’t want to lose anyone else.
The Two Years That Changed Everything
When Erica was first diagnosed, it was late. Stage three, stage four. Metastatic.
The treatment options weren’t promising. The doctors basically said, “Let’s try anything and everything experimental. Maybe you get the real thing, maybe you get the placebo.”
Erica did everything. Every trial, every option, every possibility.
For the first two years of Michelle’s marriage, she spent as much time with Erica as she possibly could. Because nobody knew how long they had.
Think about that for a second. Michelle was newly married, blending a family with three kids between them, both working full time, trying to get the kids into new schools, and navigating all the logistics of building a life together.
And her best friend was dying.
“There was a lot,” Michelle said simply. “There was a lot that we had to overcome.”
Near the end, Michelle made a choice. She took time off from work. She took time off from her family responsibilities. And she spent the last two weeks of Erica’s life pretty much at her house every single night.
“To be there to pick up whatever needed to be picked up, to make whatever needed to be made, to do whatever couldn’t be done at that moment by either her husband or her mom, her dad,” she explained.
If you’ve ever watched someone go through hospice, you know. It’s a lot. It weighs very heavily.
But Michelle showed up. Every night. For two weeks.
And when Erica died, Michelle’s work told her she couldn’t have bereavement leave because Erica wasn’t her sister.
The Kids Who Got It (And The Adults Who Didn’t)
Here’s what kills me about this story:
Michelle’s workplace – full of adults, people with life experience, people who should know better – told her that her grief didn’t qualify for official recognition.
But the middle school kids she taught? They got it immediately.
The day after Erica passed, Michelle went back to school. She’d already called in a sub because she knew she couldn’t teach. She sat in her office with the big window where kids could see her as they walked to class.
They could see the sub. They could see Michelle crying as she tried to prepare lesson plans for the next week or two.
“Why are you here? Why are we having a sub?” they asked.
And when she explained, they just… understood.
They came up to her and hugged her. They said, “I’m so sorry your friend is dead.”
Not “I’m sorry for your loss” in that distant, formal way. Just: Your friend died. That’s really sad. I’m sorry.
They wrote her handwritten cards. “I know you’re really sad right now because your friend died.”
They got it. The kids got it.
“It’s just, they got it,” Michelle said, still amazed years later. “They weren’t going to just pooh-pooh it.”
Meanwhile, the adults? They wanted the polite, surface-level interaction. “How are you doing?” “Fine.” “Oh, good.” Move on.
Why do children understand something that adults have forgotten?
Why do we lose the ability to simply acknowledge someone’s pain without needing to qualify whether it’s “legitimate” enough?
Finding Language For What She Was
After Erica died, her friends gathered to write her obituary.
They had to figure out: Who were they to her? What do you call someone who was closer than family but not technically family?
They decided on: Sisters by choice.
“She has a sister,” Michelle explained. “But then she chose the rest of us to be that intimately close with.”
Sisters by choice. Not by blood. Not by law. By choice.
And honestly? That might be even more meaningful.
Michelle told me something that really struck me. She’s adopted. She was an only child in her adopted family, but later in life, she met her biological mom and found out she had four brothers and two sisters.
She’s kept in touch with the two sisters. But when the three of them get together, she sees a relationship between the two who grew up together that she doesn’t have with them.
“I don’t have that background. I don’t have the same raised experience,” she said. “They have this relationship, they’re sisters, and they have something shared.”
And that’s what she and Erica had. They grew into adulthood together. Into parenthood (for Michelle). Into being wives. Into people who work full-time, who have mortgages, who have real adult responsibilities.
They worked into all these things together. Maybe not step-by-step, but close enough that they understood what the other was experiencing.
“Sisters by choice sounds like a very fitting title,” I told her.
Because it is. Because chosen family is family. Full stop.
In the full episode, Michelle and I discuss chosen family and why these relationships deserve the same recognition as blood relatives. We also discuss my own experience with chosen family and why this is the hill I will die on. If you’ve ever felt like your chosen family doesn’t “count” the way biological family does, this conversation will validate what you already know in your heart.
Navigating Grief Without A Framework
Here’s what happened after Erica died:
Michelle was in her mid-30s, newly married, and in a new area. She’d left teaching in public schools and started teaching private voice and piano lessons, which wasn’t full-time work.
So she had a lot of time alone. A lot of time to process. A lot of time to figure out: Who am I in this world now?
“I really just like, okay, who am I?” she said. “And also had moved to a new area. So there was a lot of feeling lonely and not knowing exactly how to process everything.”
She started figuring out how to make new friends in her 30s. She’d volunteer at school and meet other moms. She joined a group of women who got together on Wednesday mornings for coffee. She joined a choir.
She was learning how to build a life after loss.
But here’s what she didn’t have: A framework for grieving a friend.
If your parent dies, there are support groups. If your spouse dies, there are support groups. If your child dies, there are support groups.
But if your best friend dies? Your sister by choice? The person who knew you better than anyone?
“I remember seeing a flyer for a grief support group,” Michelle told me. “And I thought, well, gosh, could I even be eligible for that? I mean, she was my friend.”
Let that sink in.
She wondered if her grief was legitimate enough to even attend a grief support group.
“It’s not like I lost a child or a parent unexpectedly,” she continued. “It’s like, she was just my friend. Would people be like, ‘So what? Get over it. You have other friends.’”
This is what we do to ourselves. This is what society teaches us to do.
We minimize our own grief because the relationship doesn’t fit into the approved categories of “legitimate loss.”
Michelle did eventually start seeing a counselor in 2021-2022, nearly 20 years after Erica died. And there were several sessions devoted to talking about Erica, processing everything, crying all the tears.
“I’ve definitely processed probably a lot more in the last 10 years than I did in the first nine,” she said.
Twenty years. It took twenty years before she fully gave herself permission to grieve.
The Traditions She Stopped (And Finally Started Again)
Every year, Michelle and Erica celebrated Cinco de Mayo.
It was THEIR thing. They’d go to their favorite Mexican restaurant, or hit up Cinco de Mayo festivities in downtown Seattle, or have everyone over for margaritas and guacamole.
They’d talk about what outfits they’d wear. What color would they paint their nails? Every tiny detail. “I’ll pick you up at six. We’ll go here first, then there.”
It was elaborate and silly and perfect.
Erica’s birthday was December 24th. Every year, they’d go out on December 23rd to celebrate.
These were their traditions. The rituals that marked their friendship.
And after Erica died? Michelle stopped doing them.
Erica died on April 20th – just two weeks before Cinco de Mayo. That year, maybe Michelle and her husband went out for Mexican food. Maybe had a margarita. But she didn’t carry on the tradition of really celebrating.
She didn’t go out on December 23rd anymore.
For 19 years, she let those traditions go.
“I didn’t really realize that until this last year,” Michelle told me.
Last year, something shifted. Michelle decided: I’m going to have a Cinco de Mayo party. I’m going to have people at my house.
She doesn’t know what spurred her to do it. But she did.
Brenda (from the Marco Polo group – go listen to Episode 24 if you haven’t!) brought decorations. Another friend brought pork. Another brought tortillas and salsa.
Michelle kept talking about Cinco de Mayo, kept bringing up how much Erica loved it, how much they used to enjoy this time together.
And the day of the party, while she was decorating, she felt Erica’s presence.
“It’s about time that you are celebrating something that you and I shared,” she felt Erica saying.
“Obviously, she wasn’t there,” Michelle clarified. “But my friends – a lot of them in the Marco Polo group and others – we were all coming together. And we were celebrating friendship more so than Cinco de Mayo.”
The guys were outside at the outdoor kitchen, cutting up meat, doing their thing. The women were inside, snacking on guacamole and chips. The kids were building Legos.
“It just felt so like, why haven’t I been doing this?” Michelle said. “It felt like I kind of brought her back to life for a minute.”
And then she said something to Brenda, and Brenda responded: “Well, you know, we all feel like Erica is our friend too.”
Erica had been gone for 19 years. And she was still making friends.
How The Dead Live On Through Stories
Here’s something beautiful:
I knew about Erica before I ever talked to Michelle.
Brenda had told me about her. About the Cinco de Mayo party. About this person who felt like part of their group, even though none of them had ever met her.
“I have this friend Michelle,” Brenda told me. “She lost her best friend. And I’ve heard so many stories about her that she feels like she’s part of the group.”
That’s the thing about people who matter to us. We carry them forward. We tell their stories. We keep them alive in our memories and our conversations.
Michelle talks about Erica the way anyone talks about an important person in their life. “Oh yeah, Erica and I used to come to this restaurant.” “Erica was there when I became a mom.” “We went on a trip like that once.”
Erica is woven into Michelle’s stories because she’s woven into Michelle’s life.
And Michelle’s current friends – Brenda and the Marco Polo group and others – they’ve heard so many of these stories that they feel like they know Erica.
When Michelle finally threw that Cinco de Mayo party after 19 years, it wasn’t about creating new traditions or moving on. It was about honoring Erica. About letting her still be part of the story.
And Michelle’s friends got that. They wanted to celebrate Erica, too. They wanted to hold space for someone they’d never met but who shaped their friend so profoundly.
That’s what real friendship looks like. That’s what chosen family does.
The Friends Finale (I’m Crying Just Writing This)
I need to tell you one more story. Because it’s perfect and heartbreaking and beautiful.
Erica LOVED the show Friends. Absolutely loved it.
In September 2003, she was given about a six-month timeline. Which meant she had until about March 2004.
She made it to April. But the Friends finale was airing in May 2004.
And there was a part of her that knew she wasn’t going to make it to see that final episode.
Somehow, some strings were pulled. And Erica got to attend the final taping of Friends.
She found out there were two twins that Monica and Chandler had. She found out that one of them was named Erica. She found out whether Rachel had gotten off the plane.
She got to know these things before she left this earth, because she died two weeks before the finale aired.
“It was kind of magical,” Michelle said, crying.
But here’s the thing that absolutely destroys me:
A couple of years ago, when Friends did their reunion special, they showed footage from the final taping. They panned the audience.
And Michelle saw Erica.
“While there was something in front of her, I saw her in the audience,” Michelle told me, barely able to get the words out. “Lost it. Lost it.”
“It just felt like one of those moments – I knew she was there. I knew she experienced it. And now, years later, here she is again. And I get to experience it with her, sort of.”
Oh, and here’s the wild coincidence that I can barely handle: When Erica came back from that taping and told Michelle about it (even though she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone), she said: “Monica and Chandler have twins. And they named one of them Erica.”
What are the odds? What are the actual odds?
“I cannot watch the season finale of Friends without just crying,” Michelle said.
Yeah. Me either now. Thanks for that.
In the full episode, we talk more about the small moments and details that define our friendships – the inside jokes, the traditions, the coincidences that feel like magic. If you’re grieving someone and feeling like you’re the only one who understands why these tiny things matter so much, this conversation will make you feel seen.
What We Owe Each Other
Let me tell you what I think about all of this.
Michelle wondered if she was “eligible” for a grief support group. She was denied bereavement leave. She processed most of her grief alone for nearly 20 years.
And none of that should have happened.
Erica was Michelle’s sister by choice. She was there through every major life transition. She knew Michelle in ways that many family members never do.
The depth of a relationship isn’t determined by DNA or legal documents. It’s determined by love, by history, by the roots you’ve built together.
And when we lose someone like that – when we lose our chosen family – we deserve:
- ▪️ Bereavement leave
- ▪️ Support groups
- ▪️ Social recognition of our loss
- ▪️ Permission to grieve fully and publicly
- ▪️ Time to process without people asking “are you still talking about that?”
- ▪️ Understanding that there’s no timeline for grief
We deserve all of it. Not because we need to prove how important they were. But because they WERE important. Period.
Michelle said something that I think captures this perfectly:
“I’ve grieved more for a friend than I have for relatives that I know have passed, because my relationship with her was so much deeper than a relationship I might have with an aunt or cousin or whoever.”
That’s valid. That’s real. That deserves space.
For Anyone Who’s Grieving A Friend
If you’re reading this and you’ve lost someone who doesn’t fit into society’s approved categories of “legitimate loss,” I want you to hear this:
Your grief is real. Your loss is real. You don’t need anyone’s permission to grieve fully.
You don’t need to qualify it. You don’t need to say “I know it’s not like losing a parent/spouse/child, BUT…”
No. No buts. No qualifications.
You lost someone who mattered to you. That’s enough.
Find the support you need, even if you have to create it yourself. Talk about them. Tell their stories. Keep their traditions alive if and when you’re ready.
And if anyone – ANYONE – tries to minimize your loss or suggest you should be “over it” by now, you have my permission to ignore them completely.
Because here’s what Michelle learned after 19 years:
“She died. That’s sad. But that’s not the story. The story is everything up until that point and beyond.”
The story is about friendship. The love. The laughter. The traditions. The inside jokes. The ways they shaped you. The ways they still shape you.
The story is that you have to love them. And they got to love you. And that doesn’t end just because they’re gone.
The Permission You Need
Michelle told me, “I want to talk about this more now. Not because I want to cry. Not because I want to be sad. I miss her every day. But there was so much that was so good in it. And that’s what really needs to be shared over and over and over, as long as people want to hear it.”
So here’s your permission:
Talk about them. As much as you want. For as long as you want.
Grieve them. In whatever way feels right to you. For however long you need.
Honor them. Through traditions, through stories, through the ways you live your life differently because you knew them.
And know that your grief is legitimate. Your loss is real. Your love matters.
Because at the end of the day, chosen family is family. Sisters-by-choice are sisters. And the friends we lose deserve the same space to grieve as anyone else we love.
Michelle ended our conversation by saying, “Grief doesn’t have a time limit. But many people feel like it does. Are you still talking about that person? And it’s like, there’s no time limit. I lost somebody, and in 2024 it’ll be 20 years. And I guarantee you I’m not going to stop grieving on the 20th anniversary.”
Nor should she. Nor should any of us.
Because love doesn’t end with death. And the people who shape us stay with us forever – in our stories, in our traditions, in the way we move through the world.
Erica is still making friends through Michelle, 19 years later. Still bringing people together. Still adding color to people’s lives.
That’s not sad. That’s beautiful. That’s the legacy of a life well-loved and a friendship that mattered.
Want to hear the full conversation with Michelle about losing Erica and navigating grief? Listen to the episode on the Friendship IRL podcast, and make sure to subscribe. You can also go back and listen to Episode 24 with Brenda to hear more about the Marco Polo group and how they hold space for Erica’s memory.
For more episodes about grief and loss in friendship, check out Episode 18 with Ally Bird and Episode 35 with Suzanne Jabour.
Are you grieving someone who doesn’t fit society’s approved categories? I want to hear about them.
