The Last Woman Holding On A Story About Grief, Growth, and the Complete Refusal to Do Either

I want to tell you about my friend Donna Marchetti, but first I need you to understand something about Donna: she still has her ex-husband's Netflix password saved on seven different devices, she hasn't returned a library book since 2009, and she genuinely believes the friendship bracelet she made at a 1994 summer camp is a binding legal contract.

Donna doesn't let go. Of anything. Ever. She is the human equivalent of a TSA bin that somehow never gets cleared, just slowly accumulating the forgotten belts and dignity of everyone who passed through her life.

We met in our early thirties, at a spin class neither of us wanted to be at. I'd been dragged there by my then-boyfriend who thought cardiovascular activity would fix my personality, and Donna was there because the spin studio was directly above her ex-boyfriend Marco's apartment and she liked knowing he could hear the thudding. That was the first red flag, and also the first sign that she was my kind of person.

Donna was beautiful in the way that women who don't sleep enough and drink too much wine are beautiful — which is to say, magnificent and slightly terrifying. She had dark hair she'd been growing out since she and Marco broke up, because apparently she'd promised him she'd keep it short and she was not about to give him that. "Every inch is spite," she told me, completely sincerely, while adjusting her ponytail. I respected it so much I almost cried.

For a while, the Marco situation was just a quirky personality detail, like how some people collect vintage mugs or do CrossFit and won't stop talking about it. Donna didn't collect mugs. She collected resentments, mementos, and excuses to mention Marco's name in conversations where Marco had absolutely no business being mentioned.

"What do you want to order?" I'd ask at a restaurant.

"The risotto, I think. Marco always said my risotto was better than restaurant risotto, which was sweet, but also now I wonder if he was just saying that so I'd cook more and he could sit on the couch. I'll have the risotto."

She said this about a risotto she did not eat. She sat there for forty-five minutes pushing it around the plate, marinating in seventeen-year-old grievances, while I drank most of a bottle of Pinot Grigio by myself, which, for the record, is not that hard when you have the right motivation.

The thing about Donna is that she didn't just hold onto Marco. Marco was the headline, but the full story had a lot more chapters. She held onto her childhood bedroom furniture well into her forties — not because she was sentimental, but because she'd never "officially decided" if she was keeping it, and she refused to make a decision about something she hadn't fully processed. There is an entire wardrobe in a storage unit in Reseda that has been "not officially decided about" since the Clinton administration.

She held onto her college roommate's phone number even though the woman had changed it twice, moved to Finland, and as far as anyone could tell, was actively avoiding Donna specifically. "She's just going through something," Donna would say, with the confidence of someone who had not spoken to this woman in eleven years.

She held onto a gym membership she hadn't used since Obama's first term. I once pointed this out, suggesting perhaps the forty-two dollars a month might be better spent on something she actually did, like wine, or therapy, or wine to avoid therapy. She looked at me with genuine offense and said, "I will go back. I just need to feel ready." She said this with the solemnity of someone preparing to return to a war zone, not a 24-Hour Fitness on Ventura Boulevard.

But the pinnacle — the absolute Everest of Donna's inability to release anything back into the universe — was the situation with her house.

Donna had bought a house in 2015 with a man named Greg. Greg was, by all accounts, fine. Not exceptional. Not a disaster. Just a medium-sized human man who liked fantasy football and made a surprisingly good chili and had, at some point, stopped loving Donna in the way that a woman who still keeps concert ticket stubs from 2003 needs to be loved, which is to say: completely, unconditionally, and with an extraordinary tolerance for being handed a shoebox of feelings on a Tuesday night and asked to go through it.

Greg left. The house remained. This is because in the settlement, Donna got to keep the house, and she viewed this as a great victory, which it was, except for the minor issue that the house had four bedrooms, and Donna was one person, and she could not afford it alone, and also it was full of Greg's ghost in every conceivable way. His tools were still in the garage. His handwriting was still on the side of the guest room door — "GREG + DONNA" with a little heart he'd drawn with a Sharpie the week they moved in. She'd bought special paint twice to cover it. The paint was still in the hallway.

"You could have someone paint over it," I offered, a glass of Chardonnay in hand, staring at this tiny little heart in a way that was making me feel feelings I had not consented to feeling.

"I know," said Donna.

"Or you could sell the house."

"I know."

"Or you could find a roommate."

"I know."

She did none of these things. She refinanced instead, bought new throw pillows, and hosted a dinner party at which she spent forty minutes explaining to my boyfriend at the time why Greg had never understood her relationship with her mother, while I sat at the other end of the table making meaningful eye contact with the cheese board.

Now, I say all of this not to be cruel about Donna, because I love Donna the way you love a really turbulent flight — white-knuckle and memorable and weirdly glad it happened. I say it because the night that changed everything for Donna was, indirectly, at least partially my fault, and I think honesty is important. Especially in other people.

It was December. I'd invited Donna to my holiday party, which was really just me and six friends drinking until we were warm enough to be outdoors in Los Angeles, which doesn't take long because it's Los Angeles and it was sixty-two degrees. Donna arrived forty minutes late with a bottle of prosecco and what I can only describe as The Energy. You know The Energy. It is the energy of a woman who has made a decision in the car.

"I listed the house," she announced, before she'd even taken her coat off.

The room went very quiet, which was impressive because we were all a little drunk and my friend Tanya had been attempting to teach everyone a TikTok dance thirty seconds prior.

"You listed it?" I said.

"Zillow. This afternoon." She opened the prosecco with alarming efficiency. "Four beds, two and a half baths, updated kitchen, original heartbreak included at no additional cost."

Everyone cheered. I cheered. Tanya did a little bit of the TikTok dance as a celebration, which was context-inappropriate but appreciated.

Then Donna sat down, had three glasses of prosecco in the span of twenty minutes, and started crying. Not sad crying. Not happy crying. The third kind, which is the kind that doesn't have a clean category and shows up when something you've been gripping finally goes slack in your hands and you realize how tired your fingers are.

"I don't know who I am without the house," she said, in my kitchen, her mascara making ambitious choices in a downward direction.

"You're Donna," I said.

"That doesn't feel like enough right now."

"It's enough," I said. "Also, you're the person who kept a gym membership for twelve years out of pure stubbornness, and that is genuinely a quality I think more people should have. You're going to be fine."

She laughed, which was the goal. And then she said something that I've thought about more than I expected to, which is embarrassing to admit because I generally try not to take things people say at my holiday parties too seriously, on account of the liability.

"I think I kept holding on because letting go felt like agreeing that it was over," she said. "And if it's over, then I have to figure out what's next. And 'what's next' is terrifying, so I just... stayed in 2015. It's very comfortable in 2015."

"Obama was still president in 2015," I said.

"Exactly," she said. "It was a good year."

The house sold in March. Donna made enough to put a down payment on a condo she actually wanted, in a neighborhood where she knew people, closer to a spin class she actually attended — a different one, not the Marco one, though I respect the Marco one deeply as a monument to female ingenuity.

She did not cancel the gym membership immediately. She's not a changed person, she's a growing one, and those are different things. But she did, six weeks after the house closed, go stand in front of the guest room door and take a photo of Greg's little heart with the Sharpie and the year and both their names. Then she painted over it, with the paint that had been in the hallway for four years.

She sent me the photo afterward with no caption. I texted back a single champagne emoji. She sent back a heart.

Then she texted again: "I'm keeping the photo though."

I put my phone down and poured myself a drink, because obviously. Obviously she was keeping the photo. The woman is not going to change her entire operating system overnight. She spent a decade holding onto a gym she never attended and a man's handwriting on a door, and you don't just shed that like a jacket. You fold it up. You put it somewhere smaller. You learn, eventually, to carry it differently.

But here's the thing I didn't tell Donna at my holiday party because I was on my second glass and the moment had moved on, and also I'm not a therapist and I was wearing heels and it was not the time:

I understood her completely.

I have text messages on my phone from people I haven't spoken to in years that I cannot make myself delete. I have a sweater from a relationship that ended so badly I'm not going to describe it here because my lawyer asked me not to. I have opinions about things that stopped mattering five years ago that I will defend with the same energy I'd use to defend my life.

We are all, in some way, standing in a hallway with a can of paint, deciding whether today is the day.

The difference between Donna and most people isn't that she holds on harder. It's that she holds on honestly, without pretending she's over things she isn't, without performing a moving-on that hasn't actually happened yet, without giving the storage unit of her grief a clever name and pretending it's healed.

There is something to be said for a woman who looks at her own unfinished business and says: I see you, I'm not ready, give me a minute. Even if the minute is twelve years. Even if it comes with a gym membership nobody's using.

Even if the minute ends at a holiday party with prosecco and ruined mascara and a kitchen full of people who love you, watching you finally, finally, open your hands.

Donna is now happily in her condo. She has a very nice couch. The gym membership was finally cancelled in February, which I am choosing to interpret as a spiritual victory for all of us. Marco has no idea any of this ever happened, which is exactly as it should be.