Sprinkled With Fairy Dust

How Two Women Turned Grief Into Friendship, Legacy, and a Life Fully Lived

Perhaps there really was fairy dust involved.

Some meetings make perfect sense. They are planned, expected, and easily explained. Then there are the other meetings, the ones that seem almost too perfectly timed, as though something larger had been arranging the chairs before either person entered the room.

For Dr. Argie Nell Nichols and Jan Reed, that meeting came in October 2024 during a journey to the Dominican Republic. They had known one another through an online circle of women, but knowing someone’s name on a screen is very different from knowing her heart. When they finally met in person, conversation and laughter came easily. Later, they would say it felt as though someone had sprinkled a little magical fairy dust over the whole thing.

What neither understood yet was that beneath the laughter, they were carrying stories that would bind them more deeply. Both knew what it meant to love profoundly. Both knew what it meant for that love to become grief. And both were learning how to live fully in a world that kept moving after someone they loved was no longer physically beside them.

Argie had lost her beloved brother, Dwayne, to cancer. Calling Dwayne simply her brother hardly captures who he was. He was protector, teacher, encourager, coconspirator, and friend. He was the boy on Frost Lane who called back, “Come on, Sissy,” inviting her to climb higher, try harder, and believe she could do more than fear told her she could. Long before Argie became an educator, speaker, author, coach, and mentor, Dwayne was helping her find her voice.

Jan’s grief carried a different story. She had lost her husband, Mickey, to suicide. Yet Mickey was not merely the ending grief sometimes tries to make people remember first. He was a whole life, a husband, a presence, a man with stories, laughter, relationships, and a way of making others feel included. Jan carried not only the pain of how Mickey died, but the fullness of how he lived.

Their losses were different, and neither woman needed them to be the same. Grief does not require identical circumstances to recognize another grieving heart.

As their friendship deepened, they discovered they understood a language neither wanted to learn but both had become fluent in. They understood the empty chair, the unexpected memory, the song that could suddenly change the temperature in a room, and the moment that divided life into before and after.

They also understood something profound: love does not disappear when someone dies. It changes form.

Neither woman needed the other to fix her. They created room for something far more valuable: truth. There could be tears without embarrassment and laughter without guilt. Dwayne’s name could be spoken. Mickey’s name could be spoken. Memories did not have to be avoided.

Perhaps that was the real fairy dust. The magic was never that grief disappeared. The magic was finding someone beside whom grief did not have to be hidden.

Argie returned to Frost Lane in memory, sharing stories of the Arkansas ranch, her Cherokee grandparents, Papa and Grannie, the crabapple trees, the front porch, and the brother who had helped shape the woman she became. Jan opened the pages of her life with Mickey, remembering the ordinary moments that became precious after they were gone and the crabapple tree Mickey planted in their backyard, still standing tall today.

The women talked. They remembered. They cried. They laughed. Slowly, they realized they were not merely sharing memories. They were writing a book.

Where the Crabapple Blooms grew from those conversations, but it was never intended to be solely about death. It became a book about what remains after death has taken someone we love.

Memory remains. Influence remains. Lessons remain. Stories remain. Love remains. And, if we allow it, life remains too.

That distinction matters because neither woman wants to be described simply as someone who survived grief. Survival matters, especially when getting through one more hour feels like an accomplishment. But eventually another question arrives: What do we do with the life that remains?

There can be surprising guilt attached to that question. A grieving person laughs again and wonders whether she should have. She takes a trip, celebrates a grandchild, starts a business, walks onto a stage, writes a book, or wakes one morning looking forward to something. Then comes the whisper: If I am happy again, am I leaving them behind?

Argie and Jan have come to believe the answer is NO.

Living fully does not betray the people we have lost. Argie does not honor Dwayne by becoming smaller because he died. Every courageous step she takes still carries something of the brother who once called, “Come on, Sissy.” Jan does not honor Mickey by refusing herself every future moment of joy. Love does not demand lifelong punishment as proof that it mattered.

Grief may change us permanently, but change is not the same thing as ending. The invitation is not to become the women we were before loss. It is to become the women who carry everything they have loved forward.

That belief rests at the heart of Where the Crabapple Blooms.

A crabapple tree does not bloom because winter never came. It blooms after winter has stripped its branches bare. It blooms having endured cold, wind, darkness, and seasons that seemed to hold no evidence that beauty would return.

Then, almost impossibly, blossoms appear.

For Argie and Jan, those blossoms have taken many forms: friendship, their book, and their work helping other women examine the stories, wisdom, relationships, and unfinished dreams that make up a legacy.

For Argie, legacy has grown beyond legal documents or financial inheritance. Through HER Life Legacy™, her writing, speaking, and coaching, she invites women to consider what they are passing forward while they are still alive. Legacy lives in family stories told before they are forgotten, reconciliations made while there is still time, values grandchildren can name because they watched someone live them, and the courage to stop postponing the dream, calling, conversation, or life we hope to begin someday.

Her philosophy is simple: Honor your life. Educate the next generation. Rise into your next chapter.

Jan brings her own lived understanding to that message: “We don’t always choose what happens to us, but the journey through adversity can awaken us to who we are, who we are becoming, and what is still possible, including the possibility that grief and joy can exist together.”

Together, their experiences ask women a question grief forced both of them to confront: If your story matters, what will you do with the chapters you still have left?

That question does not dismiss sorrow. It gives sorrow somewhere meaningful to go.

Today, Argie and Jan still carry Dwayne and Mickey with them. There is no neat conclusion in which grief evaporates and everyone moves forward untouched. That is not how love works. But there are grandchildren to love, stories to preserve, stages still to stand upon, books still to write, and mornings that deserve to be fully lived. And there is a crabapple tree reminding them that winter does not get the final word.