Grief is weird. Such an unpredictable, winding road. This isn’t my first journey on said road. Yet it seems the mercy is that the memory of the switchbacks along the way dulls in the rearview mirror. I know that my experience of this road will move and shift around the next corner. But for now, from this vantage point, what I know is the hole that is left. Absence. The loss of what won’t be.

Three different times this last week I went to call or text my brother Steve. Only to stop myself at the last minute when I remembered, remembered that he is gone.

My brother died 75 days ago.

I have impressively held it together these last 75 days (she says sarcastically). Dealing with services and estate details and the things no one else wanted to handle. Even getting a tattoo in his memory. Not losing it once.

Then this last week happened. Texts left unsent, one-sided conversations. Fantasy Football drafts. And me in tears, missing my brother. Exhausted in every possible way. Losing it, finally, it seems.

If only there was a way to navigate through grief and loss other than through the beautiful, sacred, necessary messiness and uncomfortable vulnerability of it all!