When Amanda Kloots lost her husband, the actor Nick Cordero, six years ago, she had only the faintest understanding of grief. She assumed the pain would fade on a schedule — that within a year she’d feel better, within three she might even be remarried. “I was such an amateur, so green to grief,” she writes.
Now the host of the Good Grief podcast, Kloots has come to see her heartache differently — not as something to overcome or outrun, but as a companion she’s learned to live alongside.
Grief, she says, arrived fully for the first time at 38; earlier losses had never quite prepared her. Rather than treating healing as a finish line, she has found a gentler framing: that carrying grief and carrying joy aren’t mutually exclusive.
It’s a perspective she now shares with others walking the same road — the idea that grief, far from something to be “fixed,” can become, in her words, a kind of best friend.
