Earlier this year, I asked my father for a meeting in person and he said no. I haven’t seen him in seven years. Almost a decade, I keep thinking. He said he couldn’t afford the trip but sent my youngest brother a postcard from Europe the very next month. He hasn’t called that brother in nearly two years.
My other brother and I played a lot together when we were young. We were princes and princesses, teacher and student. We jumped across pillows avoiding hot lava and had sleepovers in my room every night for years. Later, something changed, and now I haven’t seen him since 2014. Almost a decade, I keep thinking.
I tried to contact my brother as long as I could. Can we talk? Can I see you? You are loved. You are missed. Today I can’t reach him: Not by phone, not by email, not on social media, not with an address. I’ve tried. I’ve looked for him in late night spirals; I’ve wondered how to reach his burner phones. I’ve considered public pleas on Facebook in case someone knows where he is, but my brother is living so he cannot be traced.
Once, desperate, I texted his old number. The number called back and my heart froze, grasping for hope, but the voice on the line belonged to a stranger. Kindly, she said, I did not want you to think your brother ignored that message. This number has been mine for a while. I was grateful for that small act of care. To have someone recognize my longing and actually respond was a comfort.
Ignoring loved ones is an affliction that runs in my family. I’ve tried with my father, too, these past few years, communicating that he hurt me and asking if he might hold that with some care. In response he argues, says I’m wrong, bats requests away, and demands I place his happiness first. I had hoped we could consider two things at once—his happiness and mine—lifting up both people’s needs instead of just one.
The father and brother-sized holes in my life are pits of grief. Deep little wells of despair that I tolerate, carry around, store in my heart and body, their missing presence felt like phantom limbs. The knowledge of what could have been is a gut-level loss, and the realization that my family has no idea who I am in the world is a shock no matter how much time passes.
This is a grief I never saw coming—even though my family dynamics were fraught, bonds tenuous, strained by generational trauma on one side and narcissism on the other, stretched by struggles with mental health and addiction that developed in response, as coping mechanisms, as ways to make it through. Still, I always assumed we would stay in it together. Life, that is.
I took for granted that we would remain committed no matter our flaws, always believing love might outweigh the pain.
My husband does not always understand why I stay in this fight. He values walking away from damaging situations, leaving completely, creating safety, and most of all, he does not like to see me hurt. Why do you expose yourself to harm, he sometimes asks. Why do you stay invested. They don’t offer the same care you give them in return. But my answer is simple: He’s my dad. He’s my brother. I miss them both.
Missing my family is a grief I always carry, no matter what I’m doing, no matter how happy I might be at the very same time. Sometimes it knocks me around more than others. Once, I was crying, really gutted, lamenting the loss of two family members who are very much alive. I was mourning that in the absence of family I haven’t found a chosen sibling with whom to ride these waves as honestly as they appear. I was grieving that I don’t always feel certain, in life, who would show up no matter what, who might call me family and really back that up. John was there.
“No one knows it affects you this much,” he said. “No one has seen you like this. Not even your family has seen you like this.”
What he said might be true, but it isn’t intentional masquerading on my part. To share private sorrows often feels too heavy, too much, like I’m burdening others with more than they wish to hold. Grief is confusing; it demands patience and acceptance for its fundamental lack of answers, which can be hard for people to understand. And practically speaking, time with loved ones is rare, so challenges don’t always come up; in the thrill of being together we choose joy over loss. As a result I often keep the buzzkills to myself.
But buzzkill or not, loss remains. Those of us familiar with loss carry it along to our birthday parties, our holiday celebrations, our big career moments—all those slivers of life we quietly wish to share with those who are gone. Loss is present in your body every day, even as the world goes on, oblivious to those who are suffering. This is just the way grief works.
Grief means different things to all of us. Culturally, we most often associate grief with bereavement, which refers to “being deprived of a close relation or friend through death.” Together we make space for bereavement in communities and organizations, though many with experience say it is nowhere near enough.
Bereavement deserves our full attention, though it is worth considering that less obvious forms of grief are actually more pervasive. Since grief is frequently hidden away, and rarely discussed, it can be hard to recognize in others. Sometimes, it is even hard to recognize in ourselves.
According to theologian Melissa M. Kelley, grief is simply “one’s response to an important loss.”
I appreciate how straightforward this is, how clear. From Kelley’s perspective, it does not matter what your loss is; it does not matter if anyone knows about it or if it makes sense to the world at large. If it causes grief in your heart, in your body, if you experience suffering, then it deserves care and attention.
Kenneth Mitchell and Herbert Anderson, authors of All Our Losses, All Our Griefs, insist that “unless we understand that all losses, even ‘minor’ ones, give rise to grief, we shall misunderstand [grief’s] fundamental nature… Loss, not death, is the normative metaphor for understanding those experiences…that produce grief.”
Grief might stem from losing a job, finding yourself without a sense of purpose, or leaving a community, among other things. In recent years, grief theory has evolved, inviting us to think about grief in more nuanced and expansive ways. Grief that feels hidden or unrecognized is referred to as disenfranchised. Disenfranchised grief is “not openly acknowledged, socially validated, or publicly observed” as grief. When grief is not acknowledged or validated, it can become even more haunting.
If our personal disenfranchised griefs leave us unmoored, then we must imagine what happens when entire communities carry grief that remains unacknowledged. Collective grief is a force, a communal experience that we in white-cis-heteronormative and otherwise privileged communities too easily ignore. Grief held communally can also become deeply personal, as people’s identities and everyday experiences are shaped by systemic violence of all kinds, the layering of griefs a heavy weight.
Whether your grief is personal or collective, forgotten or blazing, old or fresh, grief is multi-faceted, and it is a force.
Grief’s very nature is said to be unpredictable and persistent; it follows a trajectory all its own, one that does not map to everyday life or responsibilities beyond grief’s demands. When grief takes you by storm, it drops you in the middle of repeating and unpredictable cycles, distracts you and grips you. Grief is isolating, often blocking your view of love that still surrounds you. But grief also connects us.
Although experiences of grief tell a million unique stories, the way we cope with grief is shared, something that might bring us together. No matter what causes a person’s grief, the central and most important part of the grieving process is the need to reconstruct meaning after loss. Modern grief and psychoanalytic theory agree on this.
In her book, Kelley offers that “From the German root meinen, which is ‘to think,’ meaning is the deep sense we make of things, the way we understand the world, how we articulate the overarching purpose or goal of our lives, the significance we see in living, our core values… [Meaning] helps to create order, sense, and purpose out of experiences and events that could otherwise seem random, nonsensical, disordered, or chaotic… Viktor Frankl describes the search for meaning as the primary motivation of humanity; when this drive is thwarted, one faces an ‘existential vacuum.’”
As those who have experienced it know, grief is the most existential vacuum of all.
Knowing that we all seek to construct—and reconstruct—meaning from our experience, no matter how difficult, is a thread that can bring us closer together, usher us towards a more compassionate way of moving through life in community. After being knocked around by grief, we tend to carry more empathy for what others hold beneath the surface. We remain aware that some people’s fathers don’t call, that others have brothers caught in serious struggle. We remember that people’s private sorrows are often too heavy to name.
This awareness reminds us that sometimes in life, sorrow invades and we must respond. The struggle with finding meaning after loss is that grief demands we make sense of that which is nonsensical. If nothing else, grief is learning to live with painful nonsense. In many cases grief is painful nonsense you never saw coming, nonsense you likely resent.
Living with painful nonsense reminds me of walking through the woods by my house.
One day this summer, I showed up at the park hoping for peace and beauty and found a dead woodpecker on the path, its bright red neck too still. Worrying about why it died, why so many birds are dying, changed the tenor of my walk. The next day, I remembered the woodpecker but went back to the woods anyway. This walk was different: I found expanses of lilies blooming on the water.
Walking through the woods by my house, private sorrows in tow, echoed that there will be loss and there might be death. But if I keep showing up, open to beauty, open to the world unfolding around me, I will, one summer day, walk the very same path where sorrow has struck and at the place where the water meets the sky beside the wooden bridge find lily pads blooming, white lilies upon lilies, a summer song to spark the morning. The grief lightens as petals unfurl. And the woods whisper: Keep believing. Keep believing that love, in the end, might outweigh the pain.
Thank you so much, as always, for reading. Like grief itself, I found that an essay about grief needed time, needed space, demanded its own rhythms and processes. I am grateful for your presence and attention in this space and would love to hear your own thoughts on living with painful nonsense in the comments. Here are some lovely grief resources from Kate Bowler. Till next time! Take care out there.
WE’RE ALL FRIENDS HERE is written by Lauren Maxwell. Can you help us grow? Send this to a friend and ask them to subscribe. Share it on Instagram and tag @lauren_only. If you enjoy this work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support more essays like this one. Thank you so much!