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Widow shares the 'bedtime snacks' she once had with her husband and it's been healing for all

It started because she was "aching to talk to somebody.”

@donnac41/TikTok

Her "bedtime snacktimes" have become a healing salve for all

Though the grief of losing a spouse never truly goes away, there tend to be certain times when the pain hits a little harder. Many widows and widowers find that the most mundane rituals they once enjoyed with their partners, such as waking up in the morning or eating a meal, are often the most tender and lonely.

For Donna Clements, 66, who lost her husband of 43 years, Pat, in March (2025), the tradition she missed most was their “bedtime snacks,” where they would munch on a small morsel (sometimes even a late-night run to Mcdonald’s) and chat about their day.

However, Clements decided to keep this tradition alive by sharing her bedtime snack ritual with viewers on TikTok, and it’s ended up being a wholesome healing salve for all.

One video (below) really paints the picture. Donned in burgundy polka-dot pajamas, Clements sits with a bowl of Special K cereal and sliced bananas, giving folks a warm welcome.

@donnac41 Bedtime Snacktime let’s talk! #bedtime #snacktime #snack #swingingmedallions #griefjourney #fyp #fypシ #laborday #labordayweekend ♬ original sound - Donna Clements


“Hey y’all, it’s ‘Bedtime Snacktime,’” she says. “If you’re new here. I’m a recent widow, about five months.This is the hardest time of the day for me, right before bedtime, because my husband and I would always have a snack and talk about our day, and make our plans. I decided I would just do it on TikTok, because I was just aching to talk to somebody.”

Opening up further, she talks about the “dread” she felt going upstairs.

“Do you ever feel that way?” she asks. “Just maybe dread going to bed, or dread going in a certain room, or dread watching something? Don’t really want to go up there tonight, so I’m just having my snack here in the kitchen, just me and you talking about our day.”

Judging by the comments, Clements is certainly not alone in feeling this way sometimes.

“My husband died a year ago,” one person wrote." I still can’t sleep in the dark . I go to bed around 6am and get up at noon. I can't stand being in our bed alone.”

Another added, “I just lost the only grandma I’ve ever known in March. The shows we watched together will stay unwatched. I miss her so much.”

“There are times I sit in my truck. I dread going into my lonely house and I dread eating dinner by myself.”

In the few months since posting her first bedtime snack video, Clements has racked up a loyal following of folks who find as much comfort and connection as she does.

@donnac41 Blueberry White Chocolate Cheese Cake #bedtime #snacktime #snack #joinme #griefjourney #bedtimeroutine #fyp #fypシ #fastfooddonna ♬ original sound - Donna Clements


As one fan eloquently put it, “Oh miss Donna, little do you know that you’re that you’re healing us while we’re here to heal you.”

Now, whether the snacks come from suggestions from viewers—like mochi or Dr. Pepper with vanilla creamer—or are her own tried-and-true favorites (chocolate ice cream was apparently one of Pat’s go-to’s), Bedtime Snacktime is something that Clements looks forward to, thanks to the community that has emerged.

@donnac41 Replying to @Ali C Trying Dr Pepper & sweet cream #dirtysoda #momtok @Dr Pepper @Nestlé @Coffee mate @Taylor Bryant #bedtimesnacktime ♬ original sound - Donna Clements


@donnac41 Trying Mochi tonight #bedtime #snacktime #snack #bedtimeroutine @trader joes #mochi #griefjourney #fyp #fypシ ♬ original sound - Donna Clements

Thanks to opening up about her own grief journey, Clements learned, according to her interview with Today, that “Everybody’s grief journey is different, and then in a lot of ways the same.”

“When you’re going through grief, you wonder, ‘Is this normal? Is this not normal?’ One thing that so many people have said to me is, ‘Just give yourself grace.’ There’s no right or wrong way to grieve. We’re all different. It’s just a journey.”

Indeed, it’s a journey. One perhaps made a little less bittersweet through the right snack…and the right conversation.

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Waitress shares the startling note a man left on his receipt that had her 'sobbing mid-shift'

She had no idea their simple conversation had meant so much.

@k8tymilla/TikTok

"It broke me."

We simply never know what someone else is going through, nor do we know how a simple bit of connection can offer so much healing.

Twenty-five-year-old server Katie Miller certainly never would have anticipated that a seemingly ordinary conversation between her and a couple dining at her restaurant would lead to her getting a handwritten note that left her "sobbing mid shift.”

But as the scribblings left on the back of the receipt revealed, this was the couple’s first outing since losing their 27-year-old daughter, and apparently Miller offered them a precious gift: an opportunity to smile once again.

handwritten note, server, server life, waitress, tipping, restaurant, kindness, note on bill, grief, connection, losing a daughter TikTok · Katie Miller www.tiktok.com

The note read:

“Thank you for your wonderful service. Our 27-year-old daughter passed away unexpectedly about 5 weeks ago and today is the first day I have been able to get my wife out to enjoy a real meal. Thank you for making her smile. You will never know what it means to us.”

What did Miller and this woman talk about that lifted her spirits? Hair and aging. Miller shared with Newsweek that she complimented the woman’s "beautiful curly red hair," noting how “people nowadays are dying their hair to look like hers.” The woman then laughingly admitted she dyed her hair to cover some grays. Miller quipped that she just plucked hers out. That’s it. Such a normal, everyday conversation, but it made such a lasting impact.

handwritten note, server, server life, waitress, tipping, restaurant, kindness, note on bill, grief, connection, losing a daughter " You will never know what it means to us.”@k8tymilla/TikTok

Then, after seeing the note left for her, Miller told Newsweek, "You would never have guessed. It broke me. It hurts knowing people are struggling like that." Though she didn’t approach the couple again, she decided to share the story on TikTok to help remind others that "Kindness goes a long way. We can truly heal others if we're nice.”

From the slew of similar stories shared by fellow service workers in the comment section, we can take solace in the fact that these occurrences maybe aren’t as rare as we think they are.

“I took my son to work with me once, and a single man who only ordered a $3 beer tipped me $100 and wrote ‘I used to go to work with my mom too. Make sure you take him to the movies after your shift, on me.’ I kept the receipt until it crumbled.”

“One time while working in retail I was checking out these items for this older woman and I complimented her necklace. She started crying and telling me how her late husband gifted it to her. She said I made her day.”

“I had a customer ask me how old my kid was after talking about him for a while. Customer paid up and said ‘your kid is 5, correct/’ I said yes sir. Handed my 5 $100 bills and said ‘use this for him please.’ His grandson passed away, also 5. I haven’t cried that hard in my adult life ever.”

“One time I worked at Sonic, I took a woman’s drink out to her, she was sobbing alone in her car. I felt weird asking but something in me felt it was necessary…she told me her daughter had just recently tried to take her own life and was in the hospital, she wasn't sure if she would make it and was beside herself with sadness. I opened the door and just hugged her. For a moment we both needed that hug. She told me I reminded her of her daughter and how beautiful she is when she smiled. Even since then I learned to always be kind.

“We were really busy one night when I was working the bar at a restaurant I used to work at in college. I noticed a man a few rows back, just waiting in the crowd. Never moving forward. He hadn’t been served and was very hesitant looking worried. I decided to approach him…turned out he was deaf and just super overwhelmed. We wrote back and forth that evening and I made sure I stayed on top of his service. When he left, he handed me a note, and in it he told me he gets ignored a lot in busy places…The last line said, ‘thank you for SEEING me’…it broke my heart thinking about how ppl had overlooked him so often. I’m so glad I could at least make THAT night better for him. I cried in the kitchen for a good bit after he left.”

“One lady at the bar I bartended at was staring at me so oddly during the whole time I was taking care of them…honeslty I thought she didn’t like me. But before they left she came up to me and said ‘this might be weird but it is so good to meet you again’ and handed me a note [that] said I looked and talked and walked, even smiled like her best friend that had passed a few years ago…I cried so hard;I keep it in my glove box now.”

Interacting with strangers is a necessary part of life. Then again, life has a way of reminding us that none of us are really strangers at all. We all carry pain, we all seek out connection, and we all need help finding a reason to smile from time to time. May this be a friendly reminder to be that person for someone else, whenever possible.

handwritten note, server, server life, waitress, tipping, restaurant, kindness, note on bill, grief, connection, losing a daughter Go out and be kind today. @k8tymilla/TikTok

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A woman accepted a new job, then her mom died. Her new boss's response left her in tears.

"She's going to run through a wall for that manager."

Canva Photos & Elijah Linder/LinkedIn

Bereavement leave doesn't get a lot of press, and it's awkward to talk about. But this story will make you smile for sure.

When someone suffers an unexpected loss in their family, there is no simple playbook for how to respond. Grief is immense, powerful, and hard to talk about. It's awkward, and as an outsider you're afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing. You may even want to help but have no idea how other than vague sympathies and platitudes.

It's even stranger when you're the person's boss. There are professional boundaries to consider. Plus, after all, you've got a company to run and a responsibility to the other employees to make sure work gets done and the lights stay on. You're in the uncomfortable and unenviable position of having to make sure the trains keep running, so to speak, while also showing empathy and understanding.

But maybe it doesn't have to be so complicated. One story recently shared by Elijah Linder on LinkedIn shows there might be a better way for companies and managers to handle bereavement.

death, bereavement, grief, time off, paid leave, work, corporate policy, HR, heartwarming, kindness, good bosses Grief does not fit a 3-5 day schedule. Photo by The Good Funeral Guide on Unsplash

Linder runs a company called Bereave, which aims to help organizations set up better bereavement benefits and resources for their employees. So, he talks to a lot of people about what happens at work when the loved one of an employee dies.

One such story was so powerful, he just had to share:

"A woman lost her mom less than a week ago. She also accepted a new sales job during that same time," he begins in a recent post.

Can you imagine? The pain of losing a parent is overwhelming, even traumatic. Doing day to day functions like getting out of bed, eating food, and caring for your own children become almost impossible for many people. Add to that the unimaginable stress that you may lose the job you just worked so hard to get, and on top of everything else, you might be unemployed or at least persona non grata at your new workplace right off the bat.

The good thing for the company to do in this case would be to honor the offer of employment, but delay the start date to give the woman some time to grieve and deal with funeral arrangements. Ultimately, though, you probably couldn't fault either party for just deciding that the timing was unfortunate and going their separate ways. There's really no concrete timetable for how long it takes to properly grieve.

This manager, however, did one better. According to Linder, the boss honored not only the job offer, but the initial start date as well. Then, he gave the woman six weeks of paid leave right off the bat, before she'd ever had a single day of work.

She would keep her job, she would get paid, and it would all be there waiting for her when she was ready to begin. It's an incredible gesture of sympathy and trust for someone he barely knew.

"She's going to run through a wall for that manager. For that company. ... How's that for signaling 'we got you?'" Linder wrote.

Read the whole post here.

The post went viral on LinkedIn, pulling in thousands of Likes and Comments from people who were moved by the story.

Though we don't know much about the woman or the company, what amazed people was the thought process on display. Companies usually think, What's the least expensive and painful we can make this, for the company? This manager decided to make the tragedy less expensive and painful for the employee, even though she hadn't even worked a single day for him yet.

"Companies think because they can't quantify exactly what this person did into literal dollars and cents that it means it's not worth doing. Yet anyone with a human bone in their body knows how impactful something like this is to people and what it does for their motivation and engagement. It's like employment steroids and companies keep sleeping on it," wrote one reader.

"It’s not hard to be kind. I don’t know why these kinds of stories are not the norm," added another.

The average length of paid bereavement leave in the US is about three to five days for the death of an immediate family member. That is stunningly low—but it's the norm almost everywhere. Sadly, this is one benefit that's not much better in many European or other developed countries.

In another post, Linder shares a "brief" list of all the things someone has to take care of in the event of a sudden death of a close family member, including arranging funeral services, burial specifics, obtaining a death certificate, writing an obituary, and more. And that's to say nothing of the actual grieving process, which has barely begun in just five days.

And then, he writes, you're expected to go back to work a few days later like nothing happened.




Linder's story prompted others to share inspiring moments when places of work became something more, and how good people step in when corporate policies fall short.

"I'd just hired & relocated a guy & his family. I think he was there not much more than a month after the family relocated. One day jogging, he had a heart attack...and passed away. The HR Manager picked up the phone and called Payroll and told them to keep the paychecks coming, to his wife until he told them otherwise," Don Harkness commented. "And knowing she had just moved, she'd left friends and family behind. He gave her a choice. She could stay in her new home. or if she wanted to return to her previous venue, the company would pay to relocate her back. I think she opted to return. It made a deep impression on everyone."

Linder even shared another one of his own: "We recently heard about a manager who had a teammate that lost a child... The teammate took 30 days away from work. When he came back, the manager told him to delete all of his emails. Told him not to worry about catching up. Told him to start fresh and that he'd support him in doing so. How's that for signaling 'we got you...'"

One man shared a tear-jerker of a story on a Reddit thread about bereavement: "I lost my wife of 20 years when I was 44. It was cancer, 21 days for diagnosis to death. ... My company said the same...3 days [of bereavement]. I had been with the company for 20+ years. My boss said, 'Take the time you need. You will continue to get paid. If anyone says anything to you, tell them to contact me.' I will always be grateful that my boss stood by me."

Bereavement doesn't get the PR that vacation time and parental leave get, so the policies at large may not change any time soon. It's the leave you hope you never have to use, but let's be clear, it's no vacation. Having at least a few paid days off is the bare minimum a human being needs to function after a loss. But we can do better than a few days, even if we have to do it in some unorthodox ways. That's what people looking out for other people is all about. It's great to see and hear examples of it happening out there in the real world.

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'Either way you've been there before.' Mom has beautiful way to explain death to her kids.

It works for adults too.

Photo credit: Canva

"Either way you've been there before."

We talk a lot about the awkwardness of having that inevitable “birds and the bees” talk with our kiddos, but there’s another conversation topic bound to be even more anxiety inducing: what happens after we die.

It’s a difficult question for parents to answer, since not even we really know what happens after we pass on. Those who subscribe to a religious belief connected to an afterlife might have perhaps an easier time initially, but even then, there are bound to be very complex follow-up questions that aren’t so easy to navigate…especially in a way that kids can understand without getting overwhelmed. Because let’s face it, it’s an overwhelming topic no matter what age you are.

death, death talk, talking to kids about death, grief, death anxiety, afterlife, difficult conversations, parenting A mother consoling her grieving children. Photo credit: Canva

And yet, a mom named Penny offered to share how she has the “death talk" with her young ones, and it’s actually pretty darn solid.

Because every bit of it is great, we’re just putting the whole thing down below:

“When my kids would say ‘Mommy, where do you go after you die?’ I would tell them, ‘I think you probably just go to wherever you were before you were born.’ And they’d ask me ‘Where is that?’ and I’d say ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember. It might be a place, it might be nothing. Either way, you’ve been there before. Because before you were here if you were somewhere else you were OK. And if you were nowhere that was OK, too. So if you die and you go somewhere else, you’ll be OK. But if you die and it’s nothing you’ve been in nothing before and it was OK. It’ll be OK then, too.’”

@iwillfightyourdad

Shockingly we haven’t had a single existential crisis after this discussion.

Tearing up? Don’t worry, you’re not alone.

“Okay but why did this make me cry,” one person wrote. Others noted how these were equally wise words for adults who might be dealing with their own death anxiety.

“Are you sure this is an answer for kids? Because I think you just cured my fear of death as a 35 yo,” one person quipped.

Another echoed, “as an adult who panics about there being nothing after death…this brought me bittersweet comfort. That my deepest fear could be true, but to take a different perspective on it.”

Penny’s words echo that of poet and Epicurean philosopher Lucretius, who viewed death as simply a return to the non-existent state we were in before birth. If one doesn't fear the time before their birth, they shouldn't fear the time after their death, he argued.

In his book On the Nature of Things, Lucretius wrote:

“Consider the time before we were born: we felt no distress when the Carthaginians were attacking Rome on every side; and the whole world was shaken by the frightening tumult of that war… and in the same way in the future, when we shall no longer exist, and the final breaking up occurs for the body and spirit from which we are now compounded into a single unit, nothing whatever will be able to happen to us, or produce any sensation — not even if the the earth should collapse in to the sea, or the sea explode in the sky…”

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Beautifully written, but we can easily see how Penny’s “Either way, you’ve been there before” version is a little easier to comprehend for kids and adults alike.

Obviously, with a complex subject like this, there will be several layers of conversations to be had and feelings to process. After all, no one has all the answers…and that can be scary. But wisdom like this can certainly help navigate through that murky terrain. Several folks are calling for Penny to make this into a children’s book, so who knows? Maybe parents will soon have it as a little companion when they have the Grim Reaper chat with their littles. Or to come back to for themselves.

If not, they can always go back to her very thoughtful video.

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