Amanda learned to be loud in a house full of silence. Not quiet silence, but the deep, rumbling silence of brothers who communicated in grunts, shoulder checks, and the thud of sneakers against the hallway wall. Growing up as the only girl in a family that ran a funeral home meant she had two choices: disappear into the noise or learn to stand so firmly that the grief moved around her. She chose tenacity.
But tenacity, she would later learn, is not the same as knowing who you are.
At five years old, Amanda stood at the back of their church, not with crayons or colouring books, but with a stack of funeral pamphlets in her small hands. She learned to walk down the pews quietly, to offer a pamphlet with both hands, to whisper “I am Sorry for your loss” before she even understood what the words meant. The adults would look at her, this tiny girl with serious eyes and some would pat her head. Others would cry. She learned early that tears don’t always mean sadness. Sometimes tears mean someone finally feels seen.
By eight, she was answering the funeral home telephones during school holidays. Her voice had to be soft but steady. “Lawson Funeral Home, how may I help you?” She learned to listen for the breath the sharp intake that meant someone had just lost everything. She learned to pause before speaking. She learned that silence on the phone was not an awkward gap but a holy space.
By ten, she was working in the office during school breaks, filing paperwork, organizing pre-planning documents, and learning the administrative backbone of a business that ran on dignity. She watched her brothers do the front-facing work: sitting across from bereaved families, making funeral arrangements, walking them through casket selections and service details. Her brothers were good at it, stern but kind, practical but never cold. They had learned to hold eye contact with a weeping mother, to gently explain costs to a son who was drowning in guilt, to navigate the moment when grief turned into blame.
Because here is what Amanda learned by watching: grief is not polite.
Sometimes a family would arrive united, holding hands, speaking in soft tones. Other times, they would arrive already fighting. A sister angry at a brother for not visiting enough. A widow lashing out at her adult children for choosing the wrong hymn. Voices raised. Accusations thrown. Emotions so raw and misplaced that the funeral home’s front foyer became a pressure cooker of everything left unsaid during the loved one’s life.
Amanda’s brothers never flinched. They had learned what every good funeral undertaker knows: the anger is not about you. The shouting is not personal. A family fighting over flower arrangements is not fighting about flowers. They are fighting because they could not fight death. And so, they fight each other.
“Give them space,” her eldest brother Marcus would tell her. “Don’t match their volume. Match their pain.”
Amanda watched from the office doorway, a filing folder in her hands, absorbing this lesson like a second skin. She learned that compassion is not a warm feeling. Compassion is sitting in a room with people who are acting unlovable and refusing to leave. Compassion is saying, “I hear that you’re angry,” without adding “but you shouldn’t be.” Compassion is understanding that a daughter who screams at the funeral director is actually screaming at God.
That was the lesson no school could teach: empathy is not about feeling what someone else feels. It is about not making their pain about you.
Her brothers handled the arrangements. They sat across the table, pen in hand, walking families through burial or cremation, music selections, order of service booklets. They learned to ask gentle questions: “Tell me about your mother. What did she love?” They learned when to push and when to sit in silence. They learned that sometimes a family just needs someone to make a decision because grief has stolen their ability to choose.
Amanda, meanwhile, did the invisible work. She answered the phones when a widow called to inform them of the loss of her husband. She filed the death certificates after the arrangements were made, no typos, no delays, because a mistake meant a family waiting an extra week to lay someone to rest. She organized the pre-planning files for elderly clients who called every Tuesday just to confirm that their wishes were still on file.
“Mr. Charles,” she would say into the phone, “your file is right here. We remember you. You are not forgotten.”
That was her gift. Remembering. Showing up. Doing the quiet work that no one applauds but everyone depends on.
Her brothers teased her for being “soft.” They didn’t understand that softness, when paired with consistency, becomes unbreakable. They didn’t see that while they carried caskets and made arrangements, Amanda was carrying something heavier: the accumulated grief of every phone call, every misplaced outburst, every silent tear she witnessed from the office doorway.
She learned to hold it without breaking. That was her superpower. She just didn’t know it yet.
High school arrived like a crowded room with no empty chair. Amanda watched girls around her fall into and out of love like changing phone cases, pretty, temporary, and terribly expensive. She watched boys pass notes, steal glances, and promise forever before third period. And something inside her whispered: Not yet. You don’t even know your own name yet. How could you give it away?
Because here is what Amanda knew that other girls didn’t: she had already seen what misplaced emotion looked like. She had watched a sister scream at a brother over a casket because she couldn’t scream at the cancer. She had heard a husband blame the funeral home for the delay in paperwork when really, he was blaming himself for not saying “I love you” one more time.
She understood, at sixteen, that love was not a crush. Love was showing up. Love was staying. Love was the thing that made a widow choose to eat breakfast even when she didn’t want to.
How could she give that word to a boy who hadn’t even learned to sit with his own discomfort?
So, she didn’t date. Not because no one asked. A few did. But every time she imagined saying yes, she imagined becoming smaller to fit inside someone else’s story. And Amanda had spent too many years being the only girl in a house of loud brothers, too many years absorbing grief from the office doorway, to shrink now.
Instead, she poured herself into the funeral home. Into the filing system she reorganized during winter break. Into the death certificates she learned to process without a single typo, because a typo could delay a burial for weeks. Into the elderly man who called every Tuesday just to ask if his pre-planned arrangements were still in order, and the way Amanda learned to say, “Yes, Mr. Charles. We remember you. You are not forgotten.”
Attention to detail, she would later write on her first resume. But what she really learned was precision born of consequence. Mistakes in a funeral home are not spreadsheets. They are families left waiting.
Communication skills, she wrote. But what she really learned was that grief speaks in fragments. A sob. A long pause. A question asked three times because the brain cannot process the answer the first two times. She learned to answer the same question gently, every time.
Customer service, she wrote. But she almost laughed at the phrase. It was not customer service. It was pastoral care. It was sacred work dressed up in business hours.
Compassion and empathy, she wrote last. And those two words, she underlined three times.
The final high school year came. The Matric Fairwell felt like a question mark. Her parents, proud but puzzled, because Amanda still didn’t know what she wanted to be.
“I want to be a pastry chef,” she announced at the dinner table one night.
Her mother paused. Her father set down his fork slowly, the way he did before delivering news no one wanted to hear.
“Amanda,” he said, not unkindly, but firmly. “You have never once shown an interest in cooking. You don’t even warm up leftovers.”
“I like the idea of it,” she said. “Something beautiful. Something that makes people happy. I’ve spent my whole life around death and misplaced anger. I just want to make something that doesn’t hurt.”
Her father was quiet for a long moment. Then he said something she would never forget: “Honey, the people who eat your pastries will forget them in an hour. The families whose misplaced anger you absorbed without flinching? They will remember your family’s kindness until the day they die. You are not a pastry chef. You are a healer who hasn’t accepted her own medicine.”
She hated him for it. For three days, she barely spoke to him. And then, on the fourth day, alone in her room, she admitted the truth: he was right. She didn’t like cooking. She liked the idea of being admired for creating something beautiful. She wanted applause, not flour. She wanted proof that she was special, not the slow, unglamorous work of sitting with grief.
That was the first real thing she learned about herself: she had been looking for validation in the shape of a career.
She let pastry school go. Not with grace, but with grief. And then she took a gap year.
Then another.
Graphic design was her father’s suggestion. “You have an eye for detail,” he said. “You noticed when the death certificate font was misaligned last year. That’s a skill.” Amanda enrolled, sat through two weeks of typography and colour theory, and felt something inside her go terribly quiet—not the peaceful kind, but the kind that comes before a surrender. She withdrew. Her father didn’t shout. That was worse.
“You’re running out of road, Mandy.”
“Then maybe I’m not meant for the road you’re looking at.”
She took a second gap year. Her friends were finishing first year in University . Her cousins were getting engaged. Her brothers were running the funeral home and buying houses. And Amanda? Amanda was still folding pamphlets, still answering telephones, still absorbing the weight of other people’s misplaced emotions from the office doorway.
Every other girl my age knows what she wants, she thought. Every other girl has been kissed, has been chosen, has been told she matters.
But that was the lie, wasn’t it? That other people had it figured out. That a boyfriend would solve the ache. That a career title would finally make her feel like she belonged in her own skin.
She applied for a job to fill the space. A Personal Assistant to a Human Resource Manager named Delia in the financial industry. She almost didn’t go to the interview. She stood outside the glass building, heart pounding, resume crumpled in her hand and thought I don’t belong here. I’m just a funeral home girl who doesn’t even know what she wants to study.
But she had learned something over those two gap years. She had learned that not knowing is not the same as being lost. And she had learned that the soft skills she built in that funeral home, attention to detail, communication, compassion, empathy, the ability to absorb misplaced anger without taking it personally—were not consolation prizes. They were weapons.
Delia had silver hoop earrings and a no-nonsense bob. She looked at Amanda’s resume, funeral home office management, death certificate processing, telephone grief support, pre-planning administration and asked only one question.
“You’re twenty-one. Most girls your age are afraid of their own voicemail. Why aren’t you?”
Amanda thought of Mr. Charles calling every Tuesday. Of the sister who screamed at her brother over a casket. Of the way her brothers taught her not to match someone’s volume but to match their pain. “Because I’ve been answering phones for grieving families since I was eight,” she said. “I learned that listening is louder than being loud. And I learned that when someone is yelling at you, it’s almost never about you. That lesson has saved me more times than I can count.”
Delia hired her on the spot.
For the next year, Amanda sat in the back of training sessions, took notes during call centre audits, and watched recruitment interviews from behind a glass window. She learned how to write a job description that attracted the right people. She learned how to sit across from a crying call centre agent and say, “Tell me what you need, not what you think I want to hear.” She learned how to spot the quiet ones., the ones like her, who had been overlooked because they weren’t loud enough, only to discover they were the most loyal, hardest-working people in the room.
She fell in love. Not with a boy. Not yet.
With people.
One afternoon, a nineteen-year-old intern named Maria walked into Delia’s office, trembling, ready to quit. She had been told she wasn’t “a natural leader.” Amanda asked to sit with her. She didn’t give advice. She didn’t pull out a motivational speech. She just listened. For forty-five minutes, she let Maria pour out every insecurity, every fear, every cruel word a former boss had planted in her chest.
Then Amanda said: “Who told you that you have to be a natural at something to be good at it?”
Maria blinked.
“I wasn’t natural at any of this,” Amanda said. “I was a girl who handed out funeral pamphlets at six, who watched families scream at each other because they couldn’t scream at death, who took two gap years because I didn’t know what I wanted. But I learned how to pay attention. I learned how to care. And those two things have done more for me than any natural talent ever could.”
Maria didn’t quit. She stayed. She finished her internship. And six months later, she sent Amanda a message: I just got promoted. Thank you for seeing me.
That was the moment Amanda understood.
Not pastry. Not graphic design. Not even the financial industry.
Youth empowerment.
She came home that night. Her mother was folding laundry. Her father sat at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper—the same table where he had told her no to pastry school, no to a second gap year, no to every detour that had felt like failure at the time.
“I figured it out,” Amanda said.
Her father lowered the paper.
“Not what you want me to do,” she said quickly. “What I was made for.”
She told him about Maria. About the call centre agent who cried. About the way her heart raced when she helped someone see their own strength. She told him she wanted to study youth empowerment, specifically, a Bachelor of Commerce in Industrial & Organisational Psychology.
Her father was quiet. Then he said, “You know, when you were ten and you watched your brothers handle that family who was screaming at each other over the casket—I saw you standing in the doorway. You didn’t run. You didn’t cry. You just watched and learned. I knew then that you weren’t going to stay in the funeral home. You were too big for it. You were learning how to carry people, not just their dead.”
Amanda felt her throat tighten.
“This degree,” her father continued, “it’s not a detour. It’s the same road you’ve been on since you were six years old. You just couldn’t see the destination yet.”
She enrolled that fall.
And for the first time in her life, Amanda stopped running. She stopped apologizing for the gap years. She stopped measuring herself against girls who had boyfriends and five-year plans. She started waking up early, not because she had to, but because she wanted to. She started walking to class with her shoulders back. She started saying no to things that didn’t fit and yes to things that scared her.
She started dating herself. Sunday mornings became sacred: coffee, a journal, and an honest conversation with the woman in the mirror. What do you need today? What are you afraid of? What would you do if no one was watching?
Self-love, she learned, was not bubble baths and affirmations. It was showing up for yourself the way she had shown up for Maria, for Mr. Charles, for the screaming sister who just needed someone to stay in the room. Listening to your own fear without running from it. Staying. Choosing yourself even when no one else was clapping.
That was when Daniel appeared. Not as a saviour. Not as validation. Just as a quiet presence in the back of Introduction to Organisational Behaviour. He was tall, with the hands of someone who built things and the eyes of someone who read poetry. He didn’t try to impress her. He just took notes, asked thoughtful questions, and one day, without fanfare he slid a cup of coffee toward her during a break.
“How did you know how I take it?” she asked.
“You drink the same thing every Tuesday. Oat milk, one sugar. You tap the cup twice before you sip.”
She stared at him.
“I pay attention,” he said. And then he smiled, small, careful, like he was offering something valuable and wasn’t sure she’d want it.
They became study partners by accident, then friends by choice. Daniel was studying psychology with a minor in social work. He had grown up in foster care, shuffled between homes, learned early that love was conditional and attention was scarce. He didn’t talk loudly. He didn’t need to. He had also learned to listen, because no one had listened to him.
They spent late nights in the library, drawing diagrams of motivation theories on napkins. He remembered her presentation dates and sent voice notes before exams. She noticed that he never talked about his birthday, so she showed up to the library with a single cupcake and a candle.
“How did you know?” he asked.
“I pay attention,” she said. And then she smiled back.
But here is what Amanda wanted every young woman to know: Daniel did not complete her. He did not validate her. He did not rescue her from loneliness or uncertainty or the fear that she was behind in life. She had already done that work. She had already sat with herself on Sunday mornings and asked the hard questions. She had already learned that being alone was not the same as being lonely.
Daniel was not the answer to a prayer she had been begging for.
He was the gift she was ready to receive because she had stopped begging.
One evening, during a break between statistics and ethics, he looked at her across a stack of textbooks.
“You never dated in high school,” he said. Not a question.
“How do you know that?”
“Because you would have been terrible at it.” He smiled. “You were too busy holding space for people who were grieving. You were becoming someone worth waiting for.”
She felt the floor tilt, not because she needed his approval, but because he had seen her clearly. And being seen, when you already see yourself, is not addictive. It’s just beautiful.
“You waited,” she said.
“I learned that from watching you,” he replied. “You took two gap years because you refused to force something that wasn’t ready. You stood in the doorway of a funeral home and watched families fall apart, and you didn’t run. I figured if you could do that for strangers, I could do that for you.”
Amanda didn’t cry. She didn’t need to. She just reached across the table, took his hand, and said: “I’m not looking for someone to tell me I matter. I already know that. But I wouldn’t mind having someone to walk alongside.”
Daniel squeezed her hand. “That’s all I want to be.”