Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
I knew this day was coming.
For months, I’ve been surviving on prayers and hope, the way you survive anything you can’t quite bear to think about. You hold onto the maybe, the possible, the not-yet. You wake up each morning and tell yourself that today might be different, that she might beat this thing, that she’s Jill Smokler for God’s sake and if anyone could defy the odds it would be her.
But Jill was doing all the hard work and heavy lifting until the rest of us could accept what she already had.
That’s who she was. Brave first. Everything else second.
I met Jill way back in 2009, though I didn’t know I was meeting her at the time. I was writing into the void on a little blog called The TRUTH about Motherhood, pouring out my heart about babies and loneliness and the gap between who I thought I’d be as a mother and who I actually was. I was feeling out of touch, out of sorts and left behind. I was lonely. I was writing because I didn’t know what else to do with the feeling that something inside me was dying. I write to process.
And then Jill reached out.
I’d like to think she read something I wrote and recognized something that resonated with her. That she saw herself in my words the way I saw myself in hers. That moment of recognition, when you realize you’re not the only one thinking the things everyone’s too scared to say out loud. Once we started talking you couldn’t stop it. We got each other in a way that many couldn’t because they weren’t living the same truth we were, or at least they weren’t allowing themselves to admit it yet.
We were the same kind of honest.
The Girl Who Changed Everything
Late night conversations about babies and content. Deep conversations in conference lounges when we should have been sleeping. Sitting by a pool under warm Florida nights talking about all the good and bad and ugly of life. The way she’d text me something devastating and then immediately text something hilarious because that was how we both survived: by finding the laugh in the darkness. By refusing to pretend.
Jill built something massive. Over 100 million people found her words, found themselves in her stories, found permission to stop performing perfection. She wrote about the scared parts of motherhood when everyone else was writing about how much they loved it. She built community out of honesty at a time when the whole internet was performing. She changed how mothers talk about motherhood. She changed how we talk about ourselves.
But here’s what I’ll remember most: she was exactly the same in real life as she was on the page. Honestly, maybe even better. If that’s possible. Yep, she was even fucking better in person.
Funny. Real. Generous. Completely herself. No filters, no performance, no version of Jill that was better than the actual Jill. What you read was what you got, and what you got was a woman who understood the trenches of motherhood so deeply that she could make you laugh about them while also holding you while you cried.
She didn’t just write for other mothers and women. She loved them. She fed families on Thanksgiving when they had nothing. She built a nonprofit. She showed up. She was present. Even when miles and months separated us, every time we connected it was like no time at all had passed. We’d pick up exactly where we left off because that’s what happens when you really get someone. Time doesn’t matter. Distance doesn’t matter. The connection is just there, waiting.
I knew she was one of my favorite people from very early on. I just didn’t know how much she’d come to mean to me. There really is no one like Jill.
I will miss her until the day I die because that’s just the kind of impact Jill made on everyone she knew. And times that by a million and you’ll get a sense of the impact she made on her friends and those who loved her. On the mothers she gave permission to be unapologetically themselves. On the community she built. On the world she changed.
I’m not ready to let go of her yet. I’m not deleting the texts. I’m not ready for the silence where her voice used to be. I’m still processing the girl who made it okay to be messy and real and full of contradictions getting taken from us by something so brutally unfair.
But I’m grateful. I’m so grateful I got to know her. I’m grateful we found each other in the early days of motherhood when we were both lonely and looking for someone who understood. I’m grateful for every late-night conversation, every laugh by the pool, but mostly for every moment we got to be completely ourselves with each other.
Until we meet again my friend: you, me, Snoop and Willie finally having that sesh we talked about.
Thank you for being unapologetically you. Thank you for sharing your light with the rest of us. Thank you for showing us that the truth matters more than perfection.
Thank you for getting me when I needed to be gotten.
I love you so much.
XX
