A woman named Callen. She said her cousin, Maya, had been on that flight. She’d been hesitant to even board the plane that day, still raw from losing her mom.
She hadn’t even told her husband she was flying—she needed space. “She’s okay,” Callen wrote. “The baby’s okay.
But that day crushed her. She didn’t want you to feel bad. But she did want to feel seen.”
I asked if I could send her something.
A letter. A card. Even flowers.
She said Maya didn’t need flowers. She needed more people to think before they speak. Fair enough.
I started changing the way I moved through the world after that. I let people merge in traffic. I held elevator doors.
I started looking up instead of down in line at coffee shops. It sounds small, but it changed everything. People smiled more.
I smiled more. And that tightness in my chest—the one that showed up whenever I thought about the flight—slowly started to loosen. One day, while picking up lunch at a food truck near my office, I heard someone say, “Hey… are you the guy from the post?”
I turned around.
She was holding a baby. “I’m Maya’s sister-in-law,” she said. “Just wanted you to know—your words made it to her.
And they helped. She’s healing.”
I felt a lump rise in my throat. That moment taught me something I wish I’d learned earlier: being right doesn’t matter nearly as much as being kind.
You never know what someone’s carrying. A baby. A heartbreak.
A loss. Or just the weight of a bad day. What you say—how you treat people—it lands.
Sometimes softly, sometimes like a brick. And sometimes, you don’t get the chance to take it back. So yeah… I try to pause now.
I breathe before I speak. I ask instead of assume. Because maybe the most powerful thing we can give each other isn’t space on a flight.
It’s grace.
