Tend

March 2026 | Living REAL with Heidi Coleman

I have been sitting with a word for three months and I am only now letting myself say it out loud.

Not because I didn't know it. Because I was embarrassed by it.

The word is tend.

As in: tend your nervous system. Tend your marriage. Tend your grief. Tend your gift.

Not fix. Not force. Not perform your way through another year of holding everything together while quietly unraveling.

Just tend.

· · ·

Here is what I know about tending: it is not dramatic. It does not look like progress from the outside. A gardener who tends her garden on a Tuesday in March has nothing to show for it. No blooms yet. No harvest. Just someone on her knees in the dirt, paying attention, removing what's dead, making room.

That is the whole job.

I spent a long time confusing tending with not trying hard enough.

· · ·

I have been thinking about this in the context of the objects we keep.

So many caregivers I talk to are buried — literally — under someone else's life. Their parent's furniture in their living room. Their grandmother's dishes in cabinets they never open. Boxes in the garage that haven't been touched since the move but cannot be touched because what if.

We keep the objects because letting them go feels like letting the person go.

But tending your grief does not mean keeping everything. Sometimes it means holding the object, feeling what it holds, and deciding — consciously, not by default — whether it still belongs in your life or only in your memory.

There is a difference between keeping something because it brings you joy and keeping something because someone you loved once touched it.

Both feel like love. Only one of them is tending you.

The memory does not leave when the object does.

· · ·

I was embarrassed by the word tend because it felt too soft. Too slow. Too much like giving up on the version of myself who could push through anything.

But that version of me was exhausted. And she was making everyone around her exhausted too.

Tending is not soft. Ask anyone who has kept something alive through a hard winter. Ask anyone who has sat with a person who is dying and chosen to be fully present instead of busy. Ask anyone who has looked at a room full of inherited objects and decided — item by item, with full feeling — what stays and what goes.

That takes more strength than pushing through.

That is the whole practice.

· · ·

This year I am tending my nervous system. My marriage. My boundaries. My health. My grief. My writing. And the thing I keep calling my gift, even when the embarrassment makes me want to take that word back.

Not forcing. Not gripping. Not performing.

Just showing up, paying attention, making room.

It turns out that is enough.

— Heidi Coleman · heidicoleman.com