Jenny McCarthy has always worn her heart on the outside — the woman who built her entire public persona on an unfiltered, what-you-see-is-what-you-get authenticity that the entertainment industry spends millions trying to manufacture and almost never achieves naturally — and so when grief arrived at her door it arrived the only way it can arrive for someone built the way Jenny McCarthy is built, completely and publicly and without the protective distances that more guarded personalities reach for when the world is watching.

The loss that has brought her to her knees is not a celebrity or a colleague but something more personal and more human than either — a beloved friend named Kelly, a devoted New Kids on the Block fan who became part of the family that Jenny and her husband Donnie Wahlberg have always built around the community that loves them, a woman described as a mother, a daughter, a sister, and a friend who passed away after succumbing to injuries from an accident. Jenny’s tribute, posted on Instagram alongside a photograph of the two of them together, carried the specific and irreplaceable weight of words written by someone genuinely devastated: “My dear sweet Kelly. It all seems so surreal. I finally got to meet the wonderful Minnesota girl that Donnie kept raving to me about. Only to find that you were even more wonderful than he described. I am completely devastated, knowing that I will not get to know you more. I truly felt like I met a friend when I met you. Donnie and I will miss you so much and we will look in on your beautiful Keira. Rest peacefully my beautiful friend.” There is no performance in those words and no publicist behind them — just a woman saying goodbye to someone she loved and meaning every syllable of it.