Life is not a Hallmark movie, and my friend Renee was never a huge fan anyway. Still, my joy became hers when we road-tripped across the Canadian border together last winter. She knew I’d love strolling through the merry little town of Fort Langley, BC, featured in many a Hallmark movie . . . while she lay for hours in a nondescript medical office receiving cancer treatments.

The Hallmark formula so delectable to many of us of course rejects half the story. Is this why we flock to it like nectar?

There’s no disease, no death, no hate. No hurts so deep they can’t be healed in under ninety minutes. It’s life, photoshopped.

And sometimes, I confess, I love that.

But Renee got up each day with the sun, and with the Son, and shone light on what matters and what lasts. On what’s good and lovely and true.

Of all the photos of Renee and me, the ones I’ve been most drawn to since her passing this week are from that trip. I think of how she saw and assigned dignity to everyone she came in contact with, whether bookstore clerks, baristas, or baggers. No one was a stranger.

Heading home, we were so long delayed at the border we would have missed our flight out of SeaTac airport were it not for an airline representative determined to accommodate Renee. Somehow in the midst of the chaos, Renee got her story—the woman’s mother was dying. Safely seated on the plane, Renee insisted I write down her name so we could pray for her. Her name was Gloria, and I still do.

Renee’s authentic kindness, her care and prayer, moved the dial in so many others’ lives.

Most of all, she taught me how to hold two seemingly divergent things at the same time:

Laughter and pain.

Hope and disappointment.

Tenacity and surrender.

In fact, these past four years since her Stage 4 diagnosis found me drawn to her more than ever, like a bee to a sunflower. Years made richer and sweeter given their poignant context.

I knew it would cost me.

And now it’s my honor to carry a Renee-shaped hole in my chest. Today I find that I can ache for what I’ve lost in the same moment I delight in what I once had. I can simultaneously celebrate my dear soul-sister’s joyous home-going and wish things were different. Because hanging out with Renee taught me that life is better than a Hallmark movie, not in spite of but in light of such dichotomies.

What does that say about heaven? Won’t its charms be far more profound and sophisticated than the one-trick window dressing of a Hallmark production?

For Renee’s sake, I have to believe that heaven, too, must hold a place for poignancy. For our longings to be eternally fulfilled, mustn’t we long? In that place where we are each healed and whole, might we also experience complex emotions? Assignments that stretch us? Moments that move us?

What would be the point of our hard-won spiritual formation, what Dallas Willard calls “the Spirit-driven process of forming the inner world of the human self in such a way that it becomes like the inner being of Christ himself,” if not to find its end in a place where there’s an ongoing purpose for comfort and grace?

Within hours of her passing I got news of a win in my professional life, something that would’ve tickled Renee. And I couldn’t text her. Yet I could almost hear her sing-song voice through the shimmering veil that now separates us, saying, “Ding-dang it! I wish I could hug Kit!”

I love me a predictable, cinematic meet-cute in a cozy coffeehouse in a town where the white-bearded mayor wears a top hat. But I’ll be aiming for a more nuanced place to spend my long term. Where I’ll forever desire—and treasure—warm, restorative hugs from world-class huggers like Renee.