I loved Rumble, and I loved Andy’s classes. He made everyone feel seen. It was how he greeted you, shouted your name when you thought you couldn’t throw another punch, and made group fitness feel like you belonged to a group—his group.

What I didn’t know was that his dad had recently died of a heart attack. Three months later, his mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Through the years, we stayed in touch. Andy became a resource as I found my own way into the boutique fitness world, first as a marketer and after as an instructor.

When I visited New York while living in Spain, I’d take his class and we’d grab coffee afterwards to catch up.

But I never really knew how to approach “his grief.”

I remember meeting up after his mother died, wondering whether to acknowledge it.

At the end, I finally did. He thanked me.

When Sebastian died, Andy was one of the first people to reach out, with a message that came straight from the heart.

This time, over Google Meet, between school drop-off and the start of his workday, I wanted to ask the questions I hadn’t known how to ask before.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

What part of losing someone do we not talk about enough?

There’s a big piece of death that isn’t the emotional side. It’s the operations of a death.

Canceling credit cards, getting death certificates, finding passwords, arranging a service. There’s this line of, “I just want to sit here and be sad,” and then, “There’s a lot of shit that needs to get done. Who’s going to do it?”

One of my older brothers, Bobby, took that steering wheel. It’s not an easy steering wheel to grab. Sometimes the emotional weight paralyzes people, but those things still need to get done.

Somebody has to handle the logistics on top of their own emotions. That’s a very hard weight to carry.

You were building your career while your mom was sick. How did you hold those two realities?

My dad died the week I signed to become the general manager of Rumble. Three months later, my mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Moving to Manhattan already carried a lot of guilt. I was the youngest of three boys, leaving my mom after my dad died. Then came the cancer diagnosis, and I felt like the worst son on the planet.

Later, when we had to move west for work, it was, “How am I going to leave? She’s on borrowed time.”

And my mom said, “You’re absolutely going. Go build your life. Build your family.”

It didn’t take away my guilt, but it reassured me that she was in my corner. I FaceTimed her as much as I could. We had plans for her to come out west. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

It was really difficult to live this peak professional life and the valley of my personal life.

“Oh, I’m training Justin Bieber today.” And then, “How was chemo today?”

How could those two completely opposite sentences exist in the same day?

Work also helped me grieve. I wanted to show up for the team. This was something I’d worked really hard to obtain.

It became less about having a structure and more about, “What does today look like that’s going to help me function to get to tomorrow?”

What did you need from your friends, and what do you understand differently now?

I carried a lot of anger. You’re already carrying so many emotions, and now you’re layering in one you didn’t expect.

I wanted my boys to pick me up and say, “We’re grabbing a beer. We’re getting a burger.”

I was the first to lose a parent. Now, unfortunately, some of them have joined the club, and I look back with empathy. They didn’t understand how to help me.

It’s like your boss being mad at you for not doing something you were never taught how to do.

For anyone supporting a friend: check in. Send a gift card for food. Help them function. Make a call.

“If you want to talk about the game last night, I’m here. If you don’t want to talk and want to hear about my day, I’ll do that.”

Sometimes I send just a heart or “Thinking of you.” It’s a small head nod: “I see you. I know this holiday feels different when you don’t have them.”

Therapy helped my wife and me have hard conversations about how she could show up for me. I still text her sometimes when I’m on a walk: “Need five.” She understands.

Sometimes we sit in the wave together. Sometimes it’s, “Go take some time. I’ll clean the kitchen.”

The foundation is communication.

How do you share your life online without worrying about what people assume?

It’s becoming comfortable with not caring what others think.

If I post a glass of wine and a movie, maybe I’m fine. Or maybe I’m watching that movie because it was their favorite.

I don’t owe it to you to tell you I’m good. I don’t owe it to you to tell you I’m not. But if I want to, I’m going to.

More often than not, when a wave hits, I’m quiet. Other times, I’ll see something that feels like a sign from my mom and share it. I could keep that photo for myself. Sometimes I feel it might help somebody else.

Trust your gut. If you feel good sharing it, do it. If you don’t, don’t.

And you’re allowed to feel joy. Don’t imprison yourself in “I should only be sad” because of a sad situation. A sad moment and a joyful moment can happen almost back to back.

How did your parents inspire your children’s book, The Gift of Friendship?

My parents, Billy and Geri, were the glue to so many friendships. They hosted the parties. They brought people together.

That’s something I try to carry forward: connecting people. It’s what made me write the book. I wanted the lessons they left me to be something my kids, and their kids, could learn from.

There are little details throughout it that mean something to me. Bruno is always rushing because I always rush, and my mom always told me to slow down. There’s a pretzel place because my mom and I always went to Auntie Anne’s.

Those meaningful things are woven into the book, along with the lasting lesson of friendship they carried.

What would you tell your younger self?

Say yes more. Spend more time in the little moments.

I remember watching football in my bedroom while my dad watched downstairs, and my mom saying, “Go downstairs and watch it with your dad.”

I’m grateful for the times I did. They weren’t elaborate vacations. They were hangouts.

He’d ask, “Want to come to Home Depot with me?” I was always too busy. Now, as a dad, I understand he just wanted to hang out.

When I take out the recycling, I ask my daughter to come with me. Thankfully, she’s still at the age where it’s always a yes. But I know one day it won’t be.

We had a beautiful relationship. I just had so many more opportunities.

Call more. Text more. Visit more.

Now, the thing I can do is make the most of what I can as a dad to my two kids.

Those ordinary moments, I remember those more than a vacation.

What stayed with me was how Andy continued to grow through his grief and teach classes that helped so many people feel seen, even while his own world was falling apart and together, simultaneously. So many of us in that room had no idea what he was carrying.

He described it as the peaks of his professional life alongside the valleys of his personal life. I keep thinking about how often we encounter someone without knowing which part of their life we’re seeing.

They might be having their best day, their worst, or somehow experiencing both. A little kindness matters in ways we may never know.

A couple of years ago, I bought Andy’s book, The Gift of Friendship, for my bestfriend’s firstborn. I read it before wrapping it, and I loved it. Now I’m ordering my own copy, and more for all my friends who are pregnant.

The book carries forward what his parents taught him, and what so many of us felt in his classes: the value of bringing people together.

Beyond the things we buy or the milestones we reach, it’s those connections, that community, and the friendships we build along the way that stay with us.

I woke up that morning, missing him more than usual.

Feeling frustrated that I couldn’t just call him to tell him what’s been going on in my life.

Or even just a text, please, just one text.

I try to trust that wherever he is, he still knows. But some days, I wish I could tell him everything and hear what he’d say.

I want to hear his laugh. I want to see his face. I want to feel his warmth.

So as I walked out of my house, I whispered, “Please, show me a sign from my brother.”

An hour later we were at the coffee shop my boyfriend goes to every single morning, sometimes even multiple times a day.

I accompany him maybe once a week. It’s not my preferred start to the morning.

I’m what I’d like to call (after seeing this on a sticker) an “anti-social butterfly.”

To spare you the Google search if you’re curious about what that means, it’s essentially someone who can turn on charm or handle public events when needed but treats their social battery as a limited resource.

Meanwhile, my boyfriend gets energized by mornings spent at a loud, crowded coffee shop. I prefer to ease into my quiet morning with Charley by my side.

Anyways, I digress.

So here we are, after ordering our coffees, sitting on the barstools at the island table.

There’s a black notebook I’ve never seen before, just laying there.

I ask Dalton, “did someone forget it after a morning journaling session?”

Nope.

It’s a hardbound notebook where people write whatever comes to mind. There are no rules besides “be kind.”

I open it in the middle, my eyes landing directly on the center of the page.

There in the middle are several S’s, that “Universal S” (also known as the cool S) everyone drew in school in the 90s and 2000s.

Sebastian LOVED drawing it. I’m guessing because his name started with an S.

So there I was, looking at the sign I had asked for earlier that day.

You might just call it a coincidence, but to me, it felt like he was listening.

So thank you, Sebastian.
Thank you for listening.

The song talks about burying someone in the ground, and I remember experiencing a moment of pure and utter disbelief. A collapse of my life as I knew it. A fear of what came next. The almost unreal feeling of realizing that my entire orientation to this world had been shattered overnight.

What happens now?

That song stuck with me. I listened to it over and over again. Some people might have found it traumatic, but I found it comforting. Even though Hozier was singing about death, the melody brought me a strange kind of comfort in the immediate aftermath of losing Sebastian. There was a familiarity in the music that I could return to when the rest of my world felt unrecognizable.

It stayed with me through the dark months that followed. The crying. The yelling in the car. The blasting of that song because sometimes you need to feel something so intensely that it almost consumes you.

When we moved to Austin, my boyfriend got us tickets to see Hozier at ACL. It was particularly special because I’d seen him perform two years earlier in Barcelona, and it had been incredible.

But I was also afraid.

How would I feel in such a large environment with so many people? Weddings had been difficult. Other gatherings had been difficult. How would I feel hearing that song again? What would happen?

These are the thoughts that come with being someone who already tends to overthink. But when you lose someone unexpectedly, your mind begins searching for danger in places you once felt safe. You start anticipating the moments that might hurt, rehearsing your reactions before you even know what they will be. You want to know how you’re going to feel before you have to feel it.

I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel being there.

It had been almost six months since Sebastian died. The music was beautiful, but I wasn’t even sure I was happy. I expected to cry, but I didn’t. There were no tears.

I think we tend to equate tears with sadness, or tears with release, but what I felt in that moment was closer to numbness. An appreciation of the music. A little movement in my body to the beat. The smallest shift in my shoulders, almost imperceptible. It was less about experiencing the concert and more about witnessing it.

I remember standing there, listening to this song, and thinking: How can I be here? How can I be at a concert listening to the song I heard less than twelve hours after Sebastian died?

And now he’s not here.

All of this feels wrong. All of this is wrong.

Because what is a life without my brother?

I left the festival having appreciated Hozier’s performance, but still carrying a deep, deep sadness.

And then, a year and six months after Sebastian died, we went back to ACL.

This time, I wanted to see RÜFÜS DU SOL. I’ve been listening to them for almost ten years now. I might not listen to their music consistently, but every song is ingrained in me. Every lyric, every beat. Their music has become part of the soundtrack of my life. Even when I haven’t listened to them in months, the lyrics and beats are still recognizable no matter where I am. Their music carries the familiarity of a place I’ve returned to throughout different chapters of my life.

There are a few artists and DJs who hold that place for me, and after this last concert, I realized that RÜFÜS DU SOL will always be one of them.

I was so excited to see them. And I had such a beautiful and incredible time.

It felt fun. It felt joyful.

It was strange to stand in essentially the same place, with the same person beside me, doing something I loved, and feel so differently from the year before.

Instead of the deep sadness I had experienced the previous year, there was so much joy. Joy that came from within.

Not joy because my brother isn’t here. That will never be a source of joy.

But joy in being alive, and joy in experiencing something I love. Joy in recognizing how different my life has become over the past year, and how far I’ve come in allowing myself to change, allowing myself to heal, and allowing myself to move through this.

Not move on. Move through.

I was dancing. I was moving my hips with my hands stretched to the night sky. I was fully present in my body, in the music, in the moment.

My boyfriend and I like to laugh about how lifting your hands above your head is such a freeing experience, but when he was younger, someone in high school made fun of him for supposedly having really long arms. They said he looked like one of those inflatable things waving back and forth outside a car dealership. Ever since, he’s never really wanted to raise his hands higher than his shoulders.

For me, though, raising my hands is one of the fullest expressions of joy. It’s a way of embodying music, of letting go, of allowing your body to respond to the rhythm without thinking about how you look or whether you’re doing it right.

And I have so many memories of dancing with Sebastian throughout our lives. At my high school graduation. At my college graduation. At Daybreaker. At weddings.

We shared a love of dancing.

So, at this concert, I closed my eyes and thought of him.

But it wasn’t in the same way I’d thought of him at Hozier the year before. It wasn’t an overwhelming sadness or the painful awareness of his absence. It was more of a I wish you were here to see this joy.

And maybe you are here. In every moment, even if I can’t feel you by my side.

Because I know this is what Sebastian would want for me. To feel joy, to feel happiness. To reconnect with the things I love, and to be fully present in my life.

Had RÜFÜS DU SOL been headlining the year before, and had we gone to see them, I think it would have been deeply uncomfortable. I would have been trying to manufacture joy before I was ready to feel it. I would have been trying to access a happiness that I simply wasn’t ready for.

But this time, it came naturally.

And it felt so good.

The set ended with Music Is Better.

And I keep coming back to the significance of these two songs. Not necessarily because of what they were written to mean, but because of what they came to mean to me.

After Sebastian died, I often wondered how people go back to being happy.

How do you do it?

It feels awful. It feels wrong. It almost feels like a disgrace. How can I be happy when someone I love is dead?

How can I dance? How can I laugh? How can I experience something beautiful when someone who should be here to experience it with me isn’t?

I think, for a long time, I struggled with the idea that happiness and grief could coexist. That feeling good somehow meant I was moving too far away from the person I’d lost. That if I could enjoy myself, perhaps I wasn’t missing him enough.

But grief has taught me that both can be true.

And.

You can miss someone and be happy. You can feel the immense pain of their absence and still feel the immense joy of being alive. You can wish that someone were here while simultaneously appreciating the life you have in front of you.

One doesn’t cancel out the other.

And I think this is something I’m only now beginning to understand, particularly as I try to reorient myself to this world. As I read the news, watch what’s happening around me, and try to make sense of a world that already felt unrecognizable after losing someone I loved.

Having your world shattered changes the way you see it. The routines you once accepted without question can suddenly feel absurd. The expectations you followed without thinking can start to seem arbitrary. Even the ordinary act of going about your day can feel strange when the person you expected to be part of your future is no longer here.

Sometimes it feels as though everything is a matrix, a game, and the more you see the world for what it is, the harder it becomes to return to simply living within it.

Because once your world has shattered and you’ve begun rebuilding it, you can’t entirely go back to the person you were before.

And yet, we still have to live.

We still have to figure out how to participate in the world, how to find meaning in it, how to make decisions about what matters to us and what doesn’t. We have to figure out how to exist in a world that can feel both impossibly beautiful and impossibly cruel.

And perhaps part of that process is realizing that meaning isn’t always inherent in the things around us. Sometimes, we are the ones who give things meaning.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, about how we assign meaning to the world around us.

You might see a butterfly, and I see a reminder of transformation. It’s been a symbol of that for me for the last five years. You might see an ordinary date on the calendar, while I see the day my brother died. You might hear a song and I hear only the lyrics. I hear it, and I’m transported to a coffee shop in London at 7 a.m., less than twelve hours after my world shattered.

Neither experience is necessarily more correct than the other. We’re experiencing the same world through different lenses, shaped by our histories, our losses, and the experiences that have stayed with us.

We attach meaning to the world in deeply personal ways, often without realizing how much our experiences have shaped what we see. Another person might never understand why a particular image, date, or song matters so much to us. They don’t have to. Its meaning doesn’t depend on whether anyone else recognizes it.

And grief changes the lens through which we see the world.

Ordinary moments become charged with memory. Songs carry us back to the places where we first heard them. Dates become markers of before and after. An image that someone else barely notices can remind us of who we’ve lost, who we’re becoming, or what we’ve learned about ourselves.

We can’t always explain why a particular thing holds such weight. Sometimes its meaning comes from the moment we encountered it; sometimes it comes from the memories we’ve attached to it since. Often, it’s a combination of both.

Work Song wasn’t written specifically for someone grieving a sibling. And Music Is Better wasn’t written specifically for someone finding their way back to joy after loss.

But that doesn’t make the meanings I’ve assigned to them any less real.

Work Song became a source of comfort because of when I heard it, because of what I was experiencing, and because of what I needed in that moment. It became a place where I could put some of the pain I didn’t know what to do with.

And Music Is Better came to represent a different part of my grief: the possibility of joy returning. A reminder that I could dance and feel connected to my body, to my boyfriend, to my brother, and to the life I am still living.

The songs themselves hadn’t changed, but my relationship to them had. And with it, the meanings they carried.

I find that reassuring. Because there are so many things in life that we cannot control. We cannot choose what happens to us. We cannot undo the things that have changed us. We cannot always find an explanation that makes a loss feel any less devastating.

But we can remain open to the ways our experiences shape us. We can decide what deserves our attention, what we want to carry forward, and how we want to live with what we cannot change.

Perhaps that’s part of what healing is: not finding the definitive meaning of everything that has happened, but allowing ourselves to discover new meanings as we learn how to live with it.

Capacity is another word I keep coming back to.

Capacity. Integration. Witnessing.

These words have become increasingly meaningful to me because they describe what I’ve struggled to articulate about the experience of grief.

Capacity is such a beautiful word.

The capacity to hold different emotions within myself. The capacity to experience joy without needing to explain it or justify it. The capacity to feel sorrow without allowing it to become the only thing I’m able to feel.

My capacity to hold different emotions is not necessarily the same as my capacity to hold other situations in my life. I’m learning that there are things I can hold, things I cannot, and things I no longer want to.

And that discernment matters.

So does choice.

Not the choice to be happy instead of sad. Not the choice to stop grieving. I don’t believe we can simply choose our way out of grief, nor do I think that’s what we’re meant to do.

But we can make choices about how we want to live alongside it. What we want to give our attention to. What we want to make room for. Which parts of ourselves we want to nurture, and which parts of our lives we no longer want to carry.

And that, to me, has been reassuring.

Because after Sebastian dying, I spent so much time feeling as though my life had happened to me. Something devastating had occurred, and I had no say in it. I couldn’t change what happened. I couldn’t undo it. I couldn’t make sense of it in a way that would make it hurt less.

But I could begin to make choices about what came next.

I could choose to dance. To listen to music I loved. To spend time with the people who make me feel most like myself. To allow myself to change.

And I could learn to witness myself as I did.

Integration is the process of figuring out how to bring this new version of myself into the world. How to live with what has happened without pretending it hasn’t. How to reconcile the person I was before Sebastian died with the person I’ve become since.

Because that is one of the strangest things about grief: the world continues, but you don’t necessarily continue in the same way.

You can return to your job, go to dinner, attend a wedding, make plans, laugh at a joke. From the outside, your life might look as though it has resumed. But internally, you are trying to understand an entirely different reality.

You are trying to integrate an experience that has fundamentally changed you into a life that, in many ways, still expects you to be the person you were before.

And that integration takes time.

It means recognizing that you might not tolerate the same people, places, or activities anymore. That certain relationships might feel different. That the things you once thought were important might no longer hold the same weight.

It means allowing yourself to shed layers you have outgrown, even when you don’t yet know what will replace them.

And it means witnessing all of this without needing to rush toward a conclusion.

Witnessing yourself in your grief. Witnessing yourself in your happiness. Witnessing the old version of yourself, the new version of yourself, and all the versions that exist somewhere in between.

It also means witnessing the people around you.

The people who show up when you need them. The people who are willing to sit with you in your pain without trying to fix it. The people who remain present even when you don’t have the capacity to reach out, to explain yourself, or to be the friend you once were.

It’s deeply comforting to realize that you don’t have to be at your best to be worthy of someone’s presence.

And there is something equally powerful about becoming that kind of witness to yourself.

To recognize where you are without judging yourself for being there.

To acknowledge that you might be doing better today without assuming that means you’ll be doing better tomorrow.

To allow yourself to feel pride in your own growth without needing to turn that growth into a declaration that you’re healed.

Because I don’t know what next year will look like.

Maybe it will be harder. Maybe it won’t be.

Maybe there will be moments when the grief feels as immediate as it did in those first few months. Maybe there will be concerts I can’t get through, songs I don’t want to hear, days when the sadness arrives without warning.

And maybe there will be more moments like ACL this year, when I can stand in a crowd with my hands in the air, feel the music move through me, and experience a happiness that doesn’t feel forced.

I don’t know.

But I can witness the fact that this moment exists. That I am here, that I am happy, that I am capable of feeling this much joy while carrying a loss that will never leave me.

And I can allow myself to feel proud of that.

People often talk about grief as coming in waves. And it does.

But I think everything comes in waves.

Happiness, sadness, growth, collapse.

Our relationships. Our sense of self. The way we see the world.

Nothing is linear, no matter how much society tells us otherwise. We move forward, backward, and sometimes circle the same triggers and feelings for months before realizing they no longer hold us as tightly as they once did.

None of this means we’re doing “it” wrong.

I’m learning that I don’t need to measure my grief by how sad I feel, or my healing by how happy I am. I can recognize that the loss of Sebastian is one I’ll carry forever, while also allowing myself to change.

There is room for both the sorrow of a life without my brother and the joy of the life I’m creating now.

And that brings me back to dancing. To music. To raising my hands above my head, closing my eyes, and letting myself be fully present in a moment without needing to explain or contain what I’m feeling.

I don’t want to move on from Sebastian.

I want to carry him with me into the moments that make me feel most alive. I want to dance to the music I love, laugh with the people I love, and experience the fullness of being here, even when being here means living in a world where he isn’t.

I want to trust that my happiness doesn’t diminish my grief, just as my grief doesn’t diminish my capacity for joy.

A year and a half after Sebastian died, I stood at ACL and danced to Music Is Better, thinking of my brother and imagining him there with us.

The gaping hole in my life hadn’t grown smaller, neither did my love for him.

I don’t know what next year will look like, or how grief will meet me in the months ahead. But I know that I don’t have to leave Sebastian behind to keep living.

Maybe that’s what it means to move through grief. Not to move past the person you’ve lost, but to find ways to bring them with you as you keep going.

Reading my writing from those early weeks is painful for me to look back on. I wish I could hold that version of me tightly. It’s now been almost 18 months (hah, like how you refer to a newborn growing up, but instead of it being the start of a life, it’s the end of one as you knew it) and everything has changed, but that raw ache, that longing I have to see my brother, is just as present.

I close my eyes multiple times a day and just imagine his face. I look at pictures of us now, and of just him, sparingly, or else it’s too overwhelming for me, and I smile before I blink away the tears.

Below is an excerpt from one of my first Substack posts, on my previous publication:

And while finding the words to fully express how I’ve felt since he passed has been overwhelming, I did manage to write this poem the other night when I was up late with no desire to sleep.

Present day: last night I floated on my back in the hotel pool, ears under the water so everything went quiet, palm trees reaching up into the stars.

I whispered, "Hi Sebastian."

It’s sort of like being in a sorority, but not the fun parts of it, like the formals and mixers. When you meet another member of your sorority, whether they’re from the same chapter or different one, there’s this unspoken connection. And if you were in the same pledge class, there’s an extra layer of knowing, because you both remember exactly how that year felt.

Olivia and I found each other on Substack. She reached out after I said I wanted to do more of these grief conversations, since we’d both lost our brothers in ways that were similar and still completely different.

We’re not in the same pledge class, though. Her brother died seven years ago. Mine died a year and a half ago. During our hour call, we talked about pretty much everything: family, work, friends, therapy, kids, money, mediums, and who grief turns you into.

Hearing her story was comforting in a way I didn’t expect. It felt like looking down the road and seeing someone who’s walked it longer, still standing, still able to enjoy her life and the world around her. It was also just interesting. Her brother, her family, her grief, all so different from mine, and somehow so familiar.

I think that’s all it really comes down to. We’re just humans with stories, moving through this one life we get. Sometimes those stories intertwine. Sometimes we end up with the same scars in different places. And we’re all trying to make sense of it, and make the most of it, while we’re still here.

So here’s where I’m at, and where she’s at, seven years further down the road.

Our brothers

Elena

If you’ve read any of my posts previous posts, you probably know a bit about how Sebastian was a great person and also did everything almost always the “right way.” The sunscreen. The Google Docs. He saved, he planned, he lived like he was going to get older. He died at 35 doing the sport he’d loved since he was a kid.

As strange as it sounds, that part has been healing for me. Some people hear it and say what a way to go, doing what he loves. Other people think that’s a terrible thing to say. Everyone has an opinion when it comes to death.

For me, knowing he was somewhere he loved doing what he loved when he passed helped me come to terms with it more easily. I accepted it almost immediately. I still felt disbelief that it had actually happened, it was as if my brain denied it (which we now know why that happens), but there was some peace in it even though my heart was shattered.

And as to who he actually was as a person, besides a loving, kind, playful, human similar to Olivia’s brother, Sebastian was basically born naturally gifted too. Something I admired instead of resented.

(It’s interesting though, as I read through this and edit it), I just noticed that I talk about my brother in terms of his death, not who he was. Maybe because I’ve already covered in other posts who he was? He was and is so much more than that one day.

Olivia

Since we were little, Tommy was always the gifted one of us two. It was apparent from the day he was born that he naturally understood how things worked. He was reading before he ever went to Kindergarten. By the time he was in elementary school, his teachers recommended he skip a grade, so he went from 4^th straight into 6^th. In middle school they were bussing him to the nearby high school for a math class that better suited his level. By the time he was in high school, they just handed him a college math textbook and let him teach himself in an empty classroom.

I, on the other hand, had to work hard to be good at things. I would cry in frustration over how hard reading was. I learned to memorize math equations, figuring out that committing them to memory was easier than doing actual math.

Despite how different we were, I was never jealous of my brother. Not being good at things as easily as Tommy forced me to build perseverance—I would practice something over and over again until I had mastered it. I never felt like I was competing against him, but rather, he was my motivation to keep up.

So when he died, suddenly and unexpectedly, I felt cheated. I had spent my whole life looking at what he did and trying to emulate it, and then at 28 years old, I was faced with the idea that I would be on my own for the rest of my life.

I heard someone call siblings the invisible grievers and that has revealed itself to be true. When someone dies, we are quick to think about their parents, their partner, and even their friends. Siblings, for some reason, are often overlooked.

The call

Elena

About two months after, I saw a close friend who asked me to walk her through the night I got the phone call. She wasn’t being nosy. She was curious and genuinely wanted to know, as she’d clearly never been through anything like this. I froze. My stomach dropped the same way it did that night, like my body remembered before my brain caught up. I did not want to go back there.

I felt like I couldn’t tell her no. So I told her everything, and afterward it felt like I’d lived that entire night again. Why did I answer that for her?

It was a crash course in boundaries. Now I decide what I share and what I don’t. Not everyone gets the whole story, and that’s allowed.

Olivia

My dad was the one to call and tell me the news. I was in the bedroom of my West Hollywood apartment. His exact words, “I’m sorry I have to tell you that your brother died,” haunted me for years. It was the first thing I thought about when I woke up, the last thing to cross my mind before I went to sleep. I did everything I could to distract myself from it—I immersed myself in my work, I travelled, I made sure I was never alone with my thoughts. Yet, it was on replay no matter how hard I tried to push it away.

It wasn’t until years later that I learned about PTSD and how a moment in time can anchor itself to you. In you. It can make a past experience feel like it’s happening again, right then and there, every time it crosses your mind. The solution for me was a combination of therapy, spirituality, and of course, time.

The first year

Elena

They say not to make any big moves in the first year of grief. My boyfriend and I moved in with my parents for three months.

I was living inside everyone’s grief at once. My parents’. His girlfriend’s. My own. I turned into a shell of a human. I wasn’t living, I was surviving, so I shut down and did what I needed to get through the day.

And then I moved to Texas. After seven years in Europe. I was supposed to be a European princess, and instead I’m in a yeehaw fever dream wondering how this happened. There was grief in that too. My whole life over there changed overnight. (Don’t get me wrong, I am happy here and I do love this chapter, I sometimes just do a double take when I see a man with a cowboy hat and cowboy boots getting out of his monster truck with horns at Central Market).

A year and a half in, I feel pretty normal again, even though in my opinion there is no “going back.” I’ve changed but I’m also the same. I didn’t expect to say that this soon.

Olivia

The first year did not include healing for me. I was in denial, and worse, I was completely disassociated. I wasn’t able to accept the reality that he was gone and anything that seemed like evidence that it was true was upsetting to me. I remember the intense feelings I had when I came home to a beautiful bouquet of white roses and lilies that one of my coworkers sent me. I saw it and was immediately angry. Why? Because if someone at work was sending me flowers, that meant my brother had actually died. I hated those flowers.

Everyone says you have to give yourself grace in grief and it’s so true. Your emotions, your reactions, and what sets you off may not make any sense. Grief is not measured in days or weeks or even months—it’s measured in years. That is really hard to hear when you’re six months in because you don’t want to feel that way anymore and can’t imagine feeling that way for months or years longer. But the best thing you can do for grief is to welcome it. When it comes knocking, pull up a chair and give it a seat at the table. More than anything else, grief wants to be witnessed. The more you ignore it, the more it will try to get your attention.

Ironically, it can also be hard to hear that grief improves over time. Sometimes we correlate our pain to the level of love for the person we lost. Don’t let your mind trick you into doing that. Letting go of suffering does not mean you’re letting go of that person. If you are crying less that doesn’t mean you have stopped loving or missing your person. All it means is that grief is transforming. You will always carry that person with you, but it doesn’t have to be in the form of pain and sadness—let it be in the form of love and happiness and living fully.

Family

Elena

Nobody talks enough about how hard it is to grieve as a family. Everyone needs different support, and when those needs bump into each other, you hurt each other. You can end up feeling alone in a house full of people who miss the same person.

My family and I don’t grieve the same way. I started therapy in week one and did the work early, and now I’m at a place where I feel okay most days. I think that’s hard to watch when you’re not there yet.

It’s also made me ask what family even is now. There were four of us. Now it’s three, and there’s a lot of pressure to hold onto the three. I understand where it comes from. It comes from love. But I’m still figuring out what my role is in a family that got cracked open.

Olivia

Everyone experiences grief differently. That can make the ordeal really complicated for a family unit who each unknowingly brings expectations around what the shared grief will look like. Perhaps one person wants to talk about their loved one every day, while another person wants to cope with humor, while another person doesn’t want to talk about them at all. When those expectations don’t align, it can feel like you’re bashing against each other with different needs. It creates a scenario where each person can feel hurt and alone in their grief.

A family is never the same after a loss like this. There are so many layers to grief: you grieve the person, the future you won’t have with them, the changed family dynamic, and the person you were before this happened.

Kids

Elena

The Monday after Sebastian died, everyone who lived close-ish came over to our cousins. One of Sebastian’s best friend’s mom hugged me and said, “Now you know what you need to do. You need to give your mom lots of babies.”

I didn’t get mad. I knew where it was coming from. I stayed silent and now whenever I tell back that story I just laugh.

I’m a more no than yes on kids. My boyfriend is a more yes than no. And now there’s this question sitting in the back of my head: if I don’t have kids, it ends with me. Is that okay?

Six of my close friends are pregnant right now. I’m 34. And I recently rescued a dog, and the love I have for this four-legged creature I didn’t even birth is wild. The first few weeks I’d wake up in the middle of the night to check if he was okay. If I can’t find him in the yard, my heart drops. Loving a living creature that much is amazing. It’s also terrifying.

So would kids be good? Or would it be nice to live a carefree life into my 70s and 80s (fingers crossed) without that added fear? I don’t have an answer for that right now. Sebastian was supposed to be the one with lots of kids, not me.

Olivia

I never felt the call to have kids but always got excited about the idea of being an aunt. I pictured myself having nieces and nephews over for a week—creating my own version of summer camp where we do crafts, spend time outdoors and I teach them life skills. My brother was engaged to his girlfriend, so the dream was within reach, potentially only a few years away.

Then, a few months after Tommy died, the realization hit me: he would never be able to get married and have kids, and therefore, I would never be an aunt to his children. It was such a crushing blow to understand the ripple of consequences his death would create.

I also had to rethink my own decision about not having children. Suddenly, after grief, many of the beliefs I held firmly before were much more loose. I stopped seeing the world in black and white and realized how much grey there is. I haven’t decided I want to have kids as a result of his death, but I have more of a “never say never” attitude. Right now, I don’t want children, but I’m open to changing my mind.

Work

Elena

I was freelancing when Sebastian died, and I feel really fortunate about how flexible my career was during that time. I was able to close out my projects, move in with my parents, and slowly ramp back up. My grief brain was all over the place. I didn’t know what I was doing or thinking half the time, so not having the pressure of getting the spreadsheet or the strategy right was a gift despite the terribleness of it all.

Since then I’ve gone back in-house, and I’m about to start teaching group fitness classes again. I feel like previously I didn’t have much capacity and now I finally feel like my plate can handle a lot more. But I guess I won’t fully know until my plate is full.

Olivia

I had a demanding role in tech when my brother died, one that I was extremely proud of. Achievement had always been tied to self worth for me—I was only as happy as my last accomplishment. I went to work very quickly after he died because I was desperate for a distraction. I dove back into work and pretended this life-changing event didn’t happen in hopes that it would go away. Spoiler: it did not.

I have empathy for myself at that time because I was doing the best I could with the skills I had. I was well-equipped with unhealthy coping mechanisms, and not well-equipped with healthy ones. My inability to face the reality of the situation and address the grief absolutely prolonged my suffering. It wasn’t until two and a half years after his death that I first stepped foot into a therapist’s office. But you can’t be ready until you’re ready.

Soon after diving into therapy, I left the job I was at and started working at a mental health startup. I wanted to work for a company that was doing work I could be proud of. Being surrounded by people who talked about and believed in the importance of mental health care absolutely helped me in my healing process.

Friends

Elena

This time last year I was so angry at so many friends.

In that first year I had criteria. Not literally, but that’s how my brain processed it. If we used to talk every week and hang out at least once a month, and then you just disappeared, and then you popped back up six months or a year later? No. (I’ll also take some responsibility here, because I moved, which changed the dynamics a lot.)

One friend texted me maybe twice after Sebastian died. A year later she invited me to her wedding. I didn’t want to go and I was angry that she had even asked (more details here).

I’ve softened since then, but there are still people whose actions have really hurt me and I don’t see myself ever being as close to them and there’s also grief in losing those friendships too.

Olivia

Grief can feel incredibly isolating. It’s an experience that can make even your closest friends act strange. When my brother’s death first happened, I was so confused why many friends were being distant from me. Why would you leave someone alone during the worst moment of their life?

Here’s what I realized over time: people have no idea what to do with loss. There are many reasons for that: First, they don’t know what to say. People are so worried about saying the wrong thing, that they often opt to say nothing at all. They think, “I don’t want to make it worse” without realizing that their silence is communicating that they don’t care (even if that’s not true!).

Second, they think the person wants/needs to be left alone or they don’t want the loss to be brought up. This is the opposite of the truth! I wanted people to talk about Tommy to validate that he was here and his life was important.

Lastly, loss brings up people’s fear of death. It’s not a topic we like to talk about in our culture—we avoid it completely. When someone close to us experiences loss, it can ignite our own fears that something like that could happen to us. That anxiety can make us show up poorly.

Now that I’ve gone through loss myself, I have realized the ways you can best support someone else through it. Don’t text, “How are you feeling?” when you already know the answer. Don’t say “How can I help?” because you’re asking them to come up with solutions to the problem for you. Simply take something off their plate. Here are messages I would have loved to receive after my brother’s death:

“I’m sending someone to come clean your house on Sunday. You don’t even have to be there, they will arrive at 11am.”

“I am sending you dinner on Thursday. Pizza or Thai?”

“I just dropped off groceries on your stoop.”

“I am picking up your laundry on Monday and will return it clean and folded on Tuesday.”

Every single decision I had to make, from laundry to dinner, felt impossible during the beginning of grief. How can you care about groceries when your brother died? Anything someone did to lighten the load felt like a gift.

Or simply, “I’m thinking about you and Tommy today. No need to respond, but I just want you to know you’re on my mind” is a great way to show support without any pressure.

Therapy (and an SSRI)

Elena

I was in therapy with my therapist from week one. I tackled it head on. And I went on an SSRI six months later. I don’t know how much of feeling normal again is the SSRI, and how much is me deciding from the start that this tragic thing happened and I was going to deal with it in a way that would not destroy me or my life. Probably both. Either way, I’m not ashamed to talk about my mental health and how much an SSRI helped. It’s not forever and it’s not a fix, but it’s like wearing a cast while you wait for your broken leg to heal.

Olivia

It sounds crazy in hindsight, but it never even occurred to me to start therapy right after my brother died. I was just trying to survive each day, so I had no foresight into what I might need to progress toward healing. I also wasn’t yet sure if I wanted to heal. One impact of grief is you can hold onto suffering as proof that you loved that person. I wasn’t yet ready to let go of my sadness.

Then, less than two years after my brother died, my mom passed. She was an addict, and although her death wasn’t surprising based on how she treated her body, the timing was. I was still deep in the throes of grief from my brother. My mom’s death hit me like a freight train.

Suddenly, I found myself spiraling in a way that was negative and dark. Everyday I would wonder what the point of life was. It was putting a strain on everything—my work, my relationships, and my wellness. Something had to give.

I made the decision that I wanted to try to get better. It took every bit of energy I had to get myself into that therapist’s office, but I’m so grateful I did.

The woo stuff

Elena

Being “woo” has been integral to my healing. It got me through long insufferable periods of chronic pain, and through those pivotal moments in my life when everything felt hard and I couldn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. Now it’s getting me through Sebastian’s passing in a way that I don’t think anything else truly can.

I had a lot of health issues all through my 20s, and that’s what pulled me toward spirituality in the first place. Why am I the one who’s always getting sick? Why are these symptoms popping up? What threads are these unraveling?

As I opened Pandora’s box and identified how old patterns were shaping and influencing current realities, I fell deep into the depths of hardcore healing. The pain and anxiety got worse, I felt actually depressed for the first time in my life, it was awful. But as I navigated through all of that and was brought to my knees in excruciating pain for months on end, it felt like I kept expanding my capacity to hold even more. Almost as if I was getting prepared for a pain this big.

It doesn’t get easier. But I truly feel like all of that gave me the foundation to navigate Sebastian’s death the way I have. I’m moving through, not moving on.

My spirituality has also given me hope and faith that we’re always connected. That we’re transient beings in these vessels, these human body suits, and we’ll be reunited in another life. Even though I wish I had more daily “connections” with my brother, that faith keeps me going.

A few months after he passed, I did an astrology reading. She was able to connect with him through my energetic field, and she told me she saw him up there playing soccer with friends, with this playful energy about him. I had never told her about Sebastian’s playful energy but most interesting was that she didn’t know that Sebastian had a soccer ball in his apartment. His girlfriend used to tease him that she never saw him play with it, and he’d always say, “Just you wait. One day I’ll play with it.”

I guess he finally is.

I haven’t seen a medium about Sebastian yet. There’s one here in Austin I plan on seeing in a few months, but I still feel some resistance, so I’m taking my time. I don’t feel like I need to go searching for answers anymore. I can just trust that he was and always will be my brother, and that he’s truly okay and wherever he is, there is more light and love there than there is here today on this physical plane we’re experiencing.

Olivia

One of the most impactful things I did in my healing process—stay with me here—is see a Medium.

It was a beautiful experience where I learned that my mom and brother are together, happy, and at peace. That assurance helped me realize that I was allowed to be happy and at peace too. She also told me that they are part of my everyday life. So I started welcoming them into it more—talking to them, inviting them to show me signs, asking them to help me make hard decisions. Now I feel like I have a whole team of people in my corner, looking out for me all the time.

I share more of that experience here.

Money

Elena

Last year I went $40K into debt.

I was going from freelancing to in-house, my life already felt miserable without my brother, and I decided I was not going to be penny-pinching in grief. I’ve always enjoyed spending money on what brings me joy: matchas, experiences, yoga, visiting friends, traveling, cute clothing. I never wanted to feel restricted. I wish I’d cared more about saving in my 20s, but that’s in the past. And Sebastian did everything right with his money, and he still died. So what exactly was I saving for?

Now that I’m back in-house at a company with a stable paycheck and teaching again, my finances are looking way better. My boyfriend helps counterbalance me, but it’s still a tricky relationship I have with money. Still, I’m not ashamed of the debt I took on that year, and I wish more people openly discussed money in a way that wasn’t shameful or judgmental. It just is what it is.

A few weeks ago my car got hit while it was parked outside my house. Probably a drunk driver who drove off. When I told my boyfriend, his immediate reaction was a blunt, horrified, angry "Oh my god, that sucks so much."

It barely registered for me, and his reaction is what made me notice my lack of reaction. The worst thing that could happen to me already happened.

Your brother is your only brother for your whole lifetime. He’s your past, your future, and what you assume your present will be. I thought we’d be at least 80 together. Everything gets measured against that now. Is a dented car worse than losing him? Obviously not. (I wrote more about that day here)

Olivia

I have always been incredibly responsible when it comes to finances. I was like a squirrel collecting nuts—hiding them away for some future date.

Then when my brother died, I started questioning everything. He was 31 years old and had just landed his dream job. He was finally financially stable after many years of school, internships and setting himself up for success. Then it was all taken away in a flash.

I asked myself when I was “allowed” to touch my savings. Was it at 35? 40? 45? 50? What was the magic date where I could enjoy the fruits of my labor? I found it hard to answer that question.

Tommy’s death made me realize that I needed to find more balance. It’s possible to be financially responsible and spend money at the same time. One of the first things my husband and I did after he died was buy a house. Previously, I had been afraid to do that because I was scared that I would make a bad investment. Suddenly, in the wake of such a huge loss, I became less afraid of a bad financial choice and more fearful of not living a happy and full life.

Who you become

Elena

Right after Sebastian died, I posted about it in a women’s health group I was part of, and someone commented that when someone dies, there’s also a death of you, and then a rebirth of you that comes next. That’s always stayed with me.

Not everyone gets to use grief as a catalyst. A lot of people get stuck in the fear and the anger and the blame, and it just ends there. I’m trying to take the other path.

Olivia

I always tell people that I’m so grateful for my grief journey, which sometimes surprises them. I learned lessons about what it means to live well, what’s important in life, and how I want to spend my limited, precious time. It helped pull me away from attaching my self-worth to achievements. It allowed me to address inner work that I had avoided my whole life. It’s taught me how to show up with empathy and grace for others, and even myself.

It might sound like I’m saying I’m glad my brother died, but obviously that’s not the case. I wish I could have learned these lessons in a different way! But this was the hand I was dealt, and on the other side of all that pain, I love who I am today.

Scars and wounds

Near the end of our call, I asked Olivia about the memoir she’s writing. She’s been at it for two and a half years. It starts with her brother dying, but at its heart it’s about shame and how shame gets passed down.

She told me someone once taught her that you should write about your scars, not your wounds. Perhaps, that is the main difference between year one and year seven of grief: wounds become scars. Pain becomes a lesson. Loss becomes a teacher.

Dermatologists, skincare companies, estheticians, they all profit off selling you one more thing to put on your face. Obviously you shouldn’t be outside at UV 14 getting burnt. Burning is bad for your skin. But there’s a difference between being mindful about how you interact with the sun and being afraid of it.

My brother was better about it than I was.

I didn’t know his exact routine. I’m not going to pretend I stood there and watched him do it every single day. But the stretches we spent living together as adults, when we overlapped, I saw him diligently applying sunscreen each morning, and reapplying too.

Sebastian was a rule follower in some ways and a rule breaker in others. But he always did the right thing.

He was careful like that. His Google Docs were so organized I felt like the messiest person alive just looking at them. He lived within his means. He saved for his Roth IRA. He had almost no credit card debt when he died. He filed his taxes quarterly. He gave money to charity. He went above and beyond to help others. He was a kind soul.

And he died at 35, doing the one sport he’d loved since he was a kid.

Here’s the part I keep thinking about. He was that organized, and it still took months, closer to a year really, to untangle his digital footprint, his banks, the logistics of a life. If I died tomorrow, good luck to whoever has to figure mine out. It’s on my to do list. It is not done. The only part I’m sure of is that I want a water cremation, and I want my ashes spread off the beach in Rhode Island. Anyways, back to the topic of today’s post.

I’m not writing this to tell you my brother did everything right and so none of it matters. I’m writing it more so to ask: if you knew when and how you died, how differently would you live your life? If you were guaranteed not to die of skin cancer, or to have it affect you in any way, would you spend more time in the sun?

Look at Bryan Johnson. The man optimized everything, avoided the sun, went pasty, spent millions of dollars trying not to die, and this past July he announced he’d been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. Autoimmune gastritis. His words: “my stomach is eating itself.” Nobody knows what causes it. And who knows how he actually feels, spending his life indoors under controlled light, looking like a vampire.

Have you ever seen a plant that doesn’t get enough sun? It slowly withers. A plant that gets too much sun? Same thing.

So if I want to sit in the Texas sun with my face turned up at the sky for fifteen minutes with no sunscreen, so be it.

There’s a difference between being reckless (drunk driving, speeding, playing with guns, etc) and living inside a fear narrative where everything could go wrong, so surely it will.

You spend your whole life avoiding and preparing, and then it’s gone in an instant.

It reminds me of a story my boyfriend told me. He used to work with a guy who looked down on how he was living at the time, very in the moment, spending what little he had to go on adventures. Meanwhile, this guy was saving everything for retirement, basically penny pinching. A few years later, he died of a brain tumor in his twenties. Before he got to spend any of his money and have any fun while doing it.

Sad, right?

Even though I am a rule follower, just like my brother in a lot of ways, I definitely lived a more outlandish, hedonistic lifestyle than he did. I loved partying (still do, just got older), loved crazy nights out with my friends, the type where you wake up in a haze and decide to do it all over again because YOLO, until the Sunday scaries hit and you’re left questioning every decision from the night before, and then a week later you’re right back at it.

I stopped drinking because I hated the hangovers, and to be honest I don’t regret those nights. You know what I regret the most?

I wish the money I dropped on going out outfits from H&M in my early twenties had gone into an index fund instead (this is not a financial wellness blog, so whatever, but I’m still a little bitter about it because the outfits weren’t even cute and they didn’t last. It felt good in the moment though).

And that’s what this comes back to. If you could do what felt good in the moment, without any consequence, would you keep doing it? Even if it meant breaking the rules, whether those are societal, governmental, or whatever rules you think you must abide by.

Like washing your hands for 30 seconds. People are militant about germs. But what if you were never going to get sick from them anyway?

And what happens to your faith when you see people doing everything right all the time, being good functioning members of society, and they still die too soon.

Earlier this month, a 29 year old Coast Guard lieutenant named Connor Overstreet was shot and killed in Skyway, just south of Seattle, around 12:40 in the morning. No one has been arrested.

I don’t know anything about his life beyond what was written about him, but from what I read, he was not someone who should have died that night.

I know where that sentence goes. It veers straight into whether one life is worth more than another, which is the part nobody wants to say out loud. So I’ll say what I think.

If you are the kind of person who shoots a stranger for no reason, then yes, I think his life was worth more than yours.

Or maybe everyone has a reason, and you just have to peel back the layers like onions until you get to the very pit and realize we are all the same. I have struggled with these thoughts my entire life.

Are we all good people who get tainted along the way, or do some people just come out of the womb bad?

Regardless of what you think about whose life is worth living, let’s bring it back to you.

If you knew staying out until 4am was bad for you, but you loved the nightlife, the dancing, the loud music, the extra curriculars, all of it, and you also knew that no matter what you did, your life would stretch to the great age of 95, would you go out more?

Or would you, like me, protect your sleep so carefully that you only go out once a quarter now?

At what point are you sacrificing joy in the moment for a promised future that isn’t actually promised?

If you were to die in five days, five months, five years, what’s the first thing you’d stop doing because it would have absolutely no impact on how you died or the quality of you life?

All of this to say, if you could stop worrying, stop stressing, stop fueling the anxiety and fear inside you about the small things, or even the big ones, and stop focusing on what you can’t control, how would you live differently?

If you weighed what brought you joy against what you follow just to be a good person promised a long life with social security benefits and a healthy body, would you still act the way you do now? Would you even want to?

Her wedding was last month, and it was so beautiful to witness her love, her joy, for a full weekend. We spent some time together, but it wasn’t one on one time, as most people know with weddings, it never is, but that’s the time with her I’ve grown to cherish most after seven years of friendship.

The time we spent last November at her mother’s house, with her now husband and my partner, just us and her mom and her boyfriend. Where it was easy, and simple for just a few days. Matching pajamas, home cooked meals, walks in nature.

Despite it being the first Thanksgiving without my brother, and I hadn’t spent a Thanksgiving with him in probably a decade, the comfort of her mother’s home gave me comfort. And that’s what I think about, as this time of year rolls around and as I reflect back on a wedding weekend filled with familiar faces.

Being surrounded by people and a life that felt so familiar for a few days made me realize just how different my own life has become. I started thinking about the people who used to bring me comfort day to day. My close friends there. The routines we had. My uncle, aunts, and cousins I’d see. All the little pieces of familiarity that made up my life.

And I realized I’m homesick. Not for a place. For people. For routines. For the life I had created before, and the feelings that life gave me.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with the question “where are you from.”

The long answer is: I was born in Mexico and lived there until I was almost three. Then Concord, Massachusetts until I was 16. Back to Mexico for two years to finish high school, Miami for four years of college, New York City for four (and part time for almost ten, as my parents had moved there part time when I moved to Miami). Summers in Rhode Island with grandparents and cousins. Then Barcelona for seven years, in eleven different apartments.

I go back to Concord maybe once a year, as that’s where my parents still live, but I haven't called it home in a while since I haven't lived there since I was a teenager, and a lot of what I remember from there is the kind of teenage drama that doesn't exactly make a place feel like home.

I’m 34 now, and maybe that’s why the question never has an easy answer for me.

Where were you born? Where did you grow up? Where did you live the longest? Where did you feel most like yourself? Where is your family? Where is your home?

I don’t actually know which one they’re asking.

And I think that question has gotten even more complicated since Sebastian passed. Especially now, with my parents visiting me in Austin this past weekend, I’ve been feeling this longing, this aching, to feel his presence again.

I’m homesick for him. Sebastian was what felt like home to me. No matter which apartment I was living in that year, he was the thread connecting me back to something familiar. He knew where I came from. He knew every version of me. He was the anchor tying all those different homes and different lives together.

Maybe that’s what home actually is. Not a place, but the people who make you feel enough ease that you don’t have to explain yourself.

The people who make somewhere feel like you belong there too.

I felt that with my friend in Barcelona. And when I woke up from that dream, it was clear that it was an ache of missing our friendship, not the city. A longing to spend time with her, not be in the place we used to live.

I miss who I was with her. I miss the ease of it, the routines, the life we had built around each other.

And I feel an even stronger ache, down to my very core, for my brother. I just genuinely miss our friendship. Our siblinghood. I miss being known by someone who had been there for so much of my life. That, to me, is home. He was the one who taught me how to belong somewhere without having to try.

He made me feel like I was part of something long before I understood it, and I think that's subconsciously shaped how closed off I've been to belonging since April 2025. The pod we had, the one that made us a team, us against the world, us against our parents, us with our parents, us, has been shattered.

And then I think about where I am now. I live in a beautiful house in Austin. My dog, my partner, a life I’m building, a community I’m slowly starting to plant seeds in. So this is my current home. But is it home forever? Is this the house and city where my heart and soul want to be until I die.

No, I don’t think it is.

If I had to stay here every single day for the rest of my life, I don’t think that would feel right.

But I’m also not someone who wants to be around people constantly, so it isn’t as simple as needing more people around me.

It’s specific. It’s the friendships that feel like home I’m missing lately.

But here’s the part that makes no sense to me. Whenever I’m traveling, wherever we’re staying, I call it home.

It’s never “are you at the Airbnb?” It’s “are you at home?” Which contradicts everything I just said, because if home is really about people and not a specific place, why does some rental apartment I’m only in for four days get to borrow that word too.

Unless that’s the actual answer. '

Home was never the address.

It’s whatever version of myself I get to be somewhere, and who I get to be it with, however briefly.

Of course home isn’t the same for everyone.

For some people, it’s distressing. The house they grew up in doesn’t hold good memories. Someone who bounced around foster care has a completely different relationship to the word. Someone from a military family might understand home as something inherently temporary, something you’re always about to leave.

So when someone asks where I’m from, I genuinely don’t know if they’re asking where I was born or where my home is, because I don’t know where my permanent home is either.

Do you want the short answer or the long one?

I wonder if grief is part of what makes this question even more complicated now.

Because when you lose someone who was part of how you oriented yourself in the world, you don’t just lose the person. You lose a reference point. A thread connecting all the different places and versions of yourself.

I think that's part of why I've felt so homesick this year. I didn't just lose my brother.

I called Barcelona home for seven years, but even toward the end it never quite felt permanent. Then Sebastian died, who I'd thought was the most permanent person in my life, the two of us dying strategically a few years apart, late into our 80s (maybe even 90s), with matching wrinkles, and everything changed.

Everything I'd spent seven years building there got dismantled in a few months. I took some of it with me, the friendships, the way you'd ship six suitcases home. But the rest, the routine, the familiarity, I left behind like furniture on the street for strangers, plates and cups left for whoever was moving into that little haven I'd built in my first apartment, the first place I ever lived alone.

So maybe home is temporary by nature.

Maybe I’ve been building little homes my whole life.

Barcelona was one, NYC was another. Rhode Island feels like a home at times. But I guess Austin is the one I’m building now, with my partner and my dog. With the new friendships in this city I’m slowly able to make space for after a year of isolating.

But it’s not the same as the friendships that gave me pure, unquestioned stability, the kind that only comes from growing up alongside someone and having years of shared history behind you. Someone you intentionally make plans with to see multiple times a day, rearranging your schedules so you can squeeze more quality time out of each week, no matter how much the responsibilities of adulthood begin to take up.

Or when distance separates you, someone you lean into spending your time, energy, and money on just to see, even if it's for 72 hours.

My friendship with Ashley is like that. And I feel blessed and lucky to have that with several close friends I've collected over the years, though none of them live close now.

That’s a different experience of feeling at home with a person entirely, and it’s not something you can rush or manufacture somewhere new.

Maybe that’s what I’m actually longing for. Not a city, not a house, not a particular address.

The feeling of being fully seen. Of being fully understood and accepted. Of feeling fully at ease in their presence. Of belonging to someone’s thread and having them belong to yours.

I’m wondering if anyone else who’s grieved has felt this same disorientation. If you’ve ever realized you weren’t homesick for a place at all.

You were homesick for a person. For the feeling they gave you.

Or a friendship. And the routines it brought with it.

Or a version of yourself that doesn’t exist anymore.

For seven years I lived a transatlantic flight away from my immediate family, and you learn to just buck up and do it.

So as I flew into JFK on Saturday for my boyfriend’s friend’s wedding, I couldn’t help but feel all sorts of weird. Not so much anxiety as after Sebastian died, I realized that with every little bump of turbulence my mind would go to well if I go down in this plane at least I’ll get to hang out with Sebastian.

I kid you not, that’s now where my overreactive brain goes. It could also be the SSRI having some effect but instead of having my palms sweat and go clammy, I just continue reading my book or in this case, writing a Substack article.

So I get off at JFK and I can’t help but remember the last time I was here was when we had flown back because we had gotten the news that Sebastian had passed.

Those days feel crystal clear but also very blurry.

Like if I close my eyes I can teleport to the worst days of my life and relive every detail but most likely given grief brain, I’m just remembering it how I interpreted it.

So that already felt a bit jarring, and then I get on the AirTrain and one of the stops is Rockaway Blvd, which I can only assume takes you to Rockaway Beach, where Sebastian died.

A place where I’ve never been and have not yet decided if I ever will want to go.

So I land in NYC already being bombarded by emotion and ask myself, how do you move on when all you see is reminders?

I used to look forward to coming back to NYC to also see Sebastian, though my boyfriend laughs at me that I basically never made it out to Brooklyn.

But I did, a few times.

One of the last times was several years ago when I stayed in Sebastian’s living room and he got me a pair of cycling shoes that I now have been wearing again and it feels comforting. Knowing that as I pedal my heart away on a stationery bike in a dark room, I’m reminded of much simpler times.

Of when Sebastian was alive, and when my biggest stressor of the day was how many people would be attending my indoor cycling class and if I’d teach a good enough class.

But alas, it’s as if I get to choose these reminders on command.

Allowing my brain to scroll back to the memories that bring me joy.

Not the jarring ones of walking through JFK dumbfounded and not knowing what to expect besides the one reality that my brother was no longer alive.

And it made me wonder this weekend, as I walked the streets of NYC, how does one cope with all of the memories you have with the person in the exact same place once they no longer exist?

My parents still have their house, my mom finding our house a source of comfort for her as it reminds her of our upbringing in that house.

His girlfriend still in the apartment she’d moved into just months before, excited to build the next chapter of their life together, now with a new roommate but still surrounded by reminders of what they’d planned.

And then there’s me, the one who moved to a new city, a new house, and none of my life looks the same besides the friends who stuck by me.

Which has its own type of grief for me at times, I’m living an entirely new life that Sebastian never got to see.

I can optimistically hope that he still sees me from above or from whatever plane his soul is in, that he is at least present in these changes, but the physical act of creating memories together is no longer possible in the forms we knew before.

And I can’t help but wonder, is this avoidance or is this healthy survival?

But it just brings me back to how each person copes and finds comfort in grief in different ways.

There is no right way, there is only your way.

I found out when I parked for an early morning yoga class and went to open the back passenger door to grab my mat, and there it was.

The destruction.

I was in disbelief, and mostly just utterly annoyed for a few seconds. They didn’t leave a note, which made me lose faith in humanity, if we’re being honest.

But at this point it’s easy to lose faith in humanity the more you watch the news, so sometimes it’s better to just stay blissfully ignorant.

I called my boyfriend first because I don’t know what to do in these circumstances. I haven’t owned a car in ten years, and I just needed someone else to witness that this was pretty f’d up.

When I called him, his reaction was even more intense than mine, and all of a sudden it was as if it downshifted my own. I was like, yeah, this utterly sucks, but me being mad and angry about it is only going to upset me further.

The person who “got away” probably doesn’t give two shits if they didn’t leave a note. So why am I going to let their actions upset me for the rest of the day?

So I struggled for the next hour and fifteen minutes to be present in a yoga class when all I could think about was how five years ago Elena would have been really angry, really frustrated. But present day Elena knows that the worst thing that can happen to you is for someone you love to die.

And trust me, I used to be the queen of overreacting, probably from being a Manifestor and an HSP, unable to fully regulate my emotions in a society made up of people who don’t feel so deeply.

And after I left yoga, it was almost as if I said, okay world, that’s a minor inconvenience, I don’t care. Yes, I am bothered by it, but it’s not going to affect my emotional state. And that, I think, is a blessing. Among this grief, this heartwrenching life without Sebastian, a blessing I can actually tangibly see, because the things that used to cause reactions in me don’t anymore.

It reminds me of all the other times I would go from 0 to 100, and Sebastian, being the best older brother that he was, always knew how to pacify the situation. And now, without Sebastian here, the only person hurting anyone is me hurting myself.

It’s almost made me a bit apathetic about the mundane things. Not so much the deep emotions, like the feelings I felt at the recent wedding I attended, or the joy I feel when I see Charley, or the fear I feel whenever he gets too close to a passing car and I can’t help but picture how devastated I would be if anything happened to him. But I’m quick to pull myself out of that doom cycle.

It’s more so the minor inconveniences, or the major ones, like needing to file a police report, submit the insurance claim, drop my car off for several weeks, that I’m just like, why. Why waste my energy being upset and complaining about something that truly could be WAY worse.

And if you want perspective, just turn on the news. Look at what’s happening in Nepal.

So it makes me wonder about the people who have such adverse or extreme reactions to everything around them. Have they never had anything tragic happen to them, or have they never taken the time to emotionally regulate themselves? Both could be true.

But there’s a certain exhaustion that comes with living your life constantly complaining, being upset with strangers, upset over actions that literally have no impact on you (besides, yes, my car was actually impacted, ha ha, but I am okay), that I’ve just decided isn’t worth it.

And it all comes down to that old saying, the one I feel like you can understand conceptually, but you don’t start living it until living the other way just no longer feels like an option: “Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it,” by Charles R. Swindoll.

And that, to me, is what’s given me permission to just disengage. To dial it down. To own my thoughts, my mind, and how I experience this world we live in.

So thank you, whoever hit my car.

Thank you for reminding me that the worst thing in my life has already happened, so anything that comes next, I can deal with.

I hope your car at least turned out okay, so you’re not too inconvenienced over the next few weeks like me ;)

Read more

“I don’t view it anymore as, like, a hallway I need to walk through,” Wilson told me early in our call. “It’s like a room that I live in all the time. But I’ve had to mend it, or have a different relationship with it.”

We had never met before that morning. He was in Denver and we were chatting via Google Meet.

Wilson found me the way a lot of people have lately. I’d posted on LinkedIn asking other grievers to share their stories with me, not expecting much, and it went further than I imagined it would.

He read my post and reached out.

That’s the strange gift of writing something raw and honest in public: the right people find you because of it.

Andrew, Wilson’s only and younger brother, died by suicide four years ago, to the exact day we had booked our call. I don’t think that kind of thing lines up by accident.

He had been diagnosed with bipolar one at thirty, later than most people receive that diagnosis, after a manic episode became severe enough that his family had to bring him into a hospital for testing.

Sebastian drowned while surfing on an April afternoon that started like any other.

Wilson has had four years to build a new relationship with his grief. I am still building mine.

But within the first few minutes of talking to him, before either of us had said much of anything specific, I felt the feeling I always feel with people who have actually lived this: the relief of not having to explain the parts that aren’t easy to describe.

Before we began, I asked him what language felt right to use, how he refers to what happened to Andrew, because I’d been hearing different terms and wasn’t sure which ones to use. He told me the phrase is death by suicide, not committed suicide, because committed implies a crime, implies wrongdoing, when really it was a decision his brother made about his own life, in a level of pain neither of us will ever fully understand. He said it plainly, like something he’d had to learn the hard way and now carries as a kind of correction he offers other people.

Wilson shared how he had worked with his grief over the last four years.

He started working with a medium named Jacqueline, doing intense breathwork sessions that he described as feeling like he was almost on the other side with Andrew, finding a community that blended sales work with what he called inner game work, the parts of yourself that come online after loss, the guilt, the shame, the anger you didn’t know you were carrying until it was already running your life.

He told me a story about the golden Buddha, how centuries ago people covered a real golden statue in mud to protect it from being stolen. He said we do something similar to ourselves, except the mud isn't malicious. It's layered on by the people who raised us, the teachers and leaders who guided us, because they wanted us safe, successful, protected from a world that can be unkind. The mask comes from love. But over time it hardens, and most of us forget who we were before we put it on. It isn't until something world-shattering happens, and for both of us that was losing a brother, that the mask begins to crack.

Wilson told me that now, as he grows, he gets to chip away at what's left of his, piece by piece, until there's nothing covering the gold anymore. He said he already knows Andrew sees that version of him, the one still becoming, the way a teacher watches a student they already believe in.

Wilson said something else that I took with me.

He has raised twenty thousand dollars for suicide prevention in Andrew’s name this past summer. He talks about Andrew constantly now, openly, on LinkedIn, in his personal development work, because staying silent about it felt to him like a kind of dishonesty. Silence was never a language I felt comfortable in either. Though I might not always articulate it, or voice how much I miss my brother, I express myself through writing.

Again, there is neither one right nor wrong way to do this.

We talked about guilt too, the specific kind that comes from losing someone to suicide, the woulda-shoulda-coulda that Wilson said he’s fought against for years. If I had shown up differently. If I had noticed sooner. He told me that carrying that guilt, or shame, is one of the heaviest burdens a person can hold, and that if you could actually connect with the person you lost, they would never want you to carry it.

What Wilson has found, four years out, is a version of purpose he didn’t have before Andrew died. He described his old life as one lived entirely outside of himself, shaped by what his parents wanted, what society expected, what looked right from the outside, and said that after Andrew, he had to learn not to figure out who he was, but to remember who he’d always been underneath the mud. Now he writes. He speaks. He wants, in his words, to be a beacon of light, though he said that phrase almost sheepishly, aware of how big it sounds, and then owned it anyway.

I don’t know yet what Sebastian’s death has made of me in the way Wilson can already describe what Andrew’s has made of him.

Four years is a long runway, and I am not four years out. I am still in the part where the changes are still settling, where I moved twice, my partner bought a house, we got a dog, changed jobs, all inside one impossibly compressed year, and am only now finding the stillness to actually feel what happened underneath all that motion.

What stayed with me most, even just after this first year, was what Wilson said about tragedy stripping everything away and asking you what’s actually important, what matters.

He talked about wanting to embrace more childlike tendencies as he’s gotten older, less rules, less performance, more presence. I thought about my dog, about how getting him after Sebastian died gave me permission to be silly again, to exist without having to be a certain way for anyone watching. I hadn’t been playful in years before that. Sebastian was the playful one. I think some of what I lost when he died was permission to be that way myself, and I think I am only now, slowly, stealing some of it back.

Near the end of the call, Wilson said something about the people around us who need to fix things, who can’t just sit in grief with you because it’s too heavy to hold with no solution attached.

I have felt this with every person I’ve spoken to for this project, but I felt it especially with Wilson, maybe because our losses looked so different on paper.

A brother lost to drowning. A brother lost to suicide. Different mechanisms of the same devastating fact: the person who shared your particular childhood, your particular parents, your particular inside jokes, is no longer here to confirm that you remember it right.

What I keep coming back to is this: two strangers, two brothers, two entirely different kinds of loss, and somehow an hour together that felt less like grief and more like company.

Wilson didn’t need me to explain anything. I didn’t need him to either.

I think that’s what Andrew and Sebastian would want for both of us, not to carry this alone, but to keep finding people who have similar scars.

I have done all of it. The journaling, the breathwork, the tapping, the meditations. I have written pages I never reread and followed protocols I found on the internet at two in the morning, looking for whatever I could to heal my pain. Until I realized that the less I did, the more I could surrender into the extreme discomfort. And that’s exactly what happened when my brother died.

Instead of turning to meditation, journaling, breathwork, tapping, anything that would make this hurt less, or hurt correctly, or hurt on a schedule I could recognize as progress, I just stopped. I fully leaned in and accepted that this pain wouldn’t go away by wishing it away. That the only thing I needed to do was listen to what my design needed. And by that, I mean my Human Design.

I found Human Design a few years before my brother died, and it truly changed my life, how I move through work and through relationships. It’s a system built from your exact birth date, time, and place, the same information astrology uses, but it maps something different: an energetic chart of how you’re built to interact with the world.

There are five types. Generators and manifesting generators, who make up the majority of people, roughly seventy percent combined, built to respond to life and work through consistent, sustainable energy. Projectors, around twenty percent, built to guide and see clearly but not built to initiate constantly. Reflectors, less than one percent, who take in the energy of everyone around them like a mirror. And manifestors, about nine percent, built to initiate, to move on our own timing, and, crucially, to need far more rest and far more solitude than the world tells us is normal.

If you’re skeptical of what sounds like just another personality test, I understand. I’d point you to the Forer effect, the idea that vague descriptions feel uncannily personal to whoever’s reading them. Human Design isn’t that. It isn’t vague. And the story behind how it came into the world, channeled by a man in the Ibiza mountains over the course of eight days, is strange enough that I’ve stopped needing it to make sense in order to trust what it’s shown me.

My orientation to being a manifestor stayed mainly theoretical until my brother died and I sat across from my therapist and told her about this desire I had, this deep pull to isolate, to be left completely alone, and I said it like a confession, like something I needed her to talk me out of. She was the one who reminded me. She said, that’s your design. That’s not avoidance. That’s not you falling apart in the wrong direction.

That’s a manifestor doing exactly what a manifestor is built to do when everything in her life has just been detonated.

That was the moment this stopped being a personality framework I found interesting and became a permission slip. Permission to need so much space, so much quiet, so much time alone in what feels like a cave, that I used to worry something was wrong with me. Permission to process my own emotions by myself before I could bring them to anyone else. Permission to sit with the fact that being alone, so alone, does not mean I am lonely. It does not mean I don’t want the people I love near me. It means that in that particular moment, the most healing presence available to me is my own.

For a long time before that, I thought needing this meant I was doing grief wrong. I sat in the grief groups. I showed up and performed the version of mourning I thought I was supposed to be having, and I left every one of those rooms more emotionally drained than when I walked in, and I could not understand why. Why wasn’t this helping. Why did everyone else in the room seem to be getting something from it that I wasn’t. I kept asking myself what was wrong with me, when the real question was never that. The real question was what’s my design.

There is not one certain way to be a person, and there is not one certain way to grieve. Some people need to be surrounded, talking about their person constantly, held by a room. That’s a generator or a manifesting generator, moving through grief the way they move through everything, in steady response to what’s around them. Other people need the opposite, need to initiate their own process on their own timing, alone. Neither is more evolved or more healed. It is just orientation. It is just knowing which way you face.

The other thing almost no one tells you is that happiness and grief are not opposites. They do not cancel each other out. As the happiness in my life has grown, so has the sadness, in equal measure, running alongside it the entire time. There are still moments, good moments, full moments, where I stop and ask myself, is this real life. I think that question is the thing that separates grievers from everyone else. You can be completely happy and completely wrecked in the same breath, because your person is still gone, no matter how good the day is.

I think this is what society pushes us to forget as fast as possible. Nobody asks anymore. Nobody says his name. Nobody asks how you’re really doing, or what he was like, and even when people want to, there’s an unspoken agreement not to. The silence gets mistaken for okayness. But it isn’t that we’re okay. It’s that we’ve had no choice but to keep moving, because the world doesn’t build in space for anyone to actually stop.

Grief is not black and white. It is gray, all the way through, and there is nothing to do about that except sit with it. It’s like looking up at a cloudy sky. You can yell at it if you want to. You can be furious that it won’t clear. Or you can just sit with it. Sometimes directly under it.

Some days it’s cloudy from morning to night and nothing changes. Some days it’s cloudy and then the sun breaks through, shines momentarily directly on you, and then it clouds back over again. Some days it’s entirely sunny.

That’s what grief has become for me: the clouds are always there, and so is the sun, and the only real question, on any given day, is which one is stronger. And that’s what I think you also have to learn to surrender into.

I want to acknowledge that sometimes you can’t just surrender. You can’t just stay in bed when you have bills to pay and children to take care of. But there is still a way to surrender into however you’re feeling, inside whatever your day actually allows.

Maybe that’s picking up the phone and telling a friend exactly how you’re feeling. Or maybe that’s letting every call go to voicemail because you don’t have the energy, and that is okay too.

So, if you have never looked up your own Human Design, I want to gently invite you to. Here’s the link I use and I recommend exporting your results afterwards to a pdf.

Just take a peak to see what it says about how you’re built, without judgment, without needing it to confirm anything you already believe about yourself.

It won’t tell you how to grieve. It might just tell you why the way you’ve been grieving all along makes more sense than you thought. And if you wanted to take it a step further, depending on your relationship with AI, it’s always interesting to ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, based on my Human Design, what would be the ways I move through grief.

I’ll share bits and pieces of mine so you can see how it looks in practice. (see below, all taken from Gemini, the chatbot that knows nothing about me as I always use Claude)

As an Emotional Manifestor with a 5/1 Profile, grief impacts your system in ways that run counter to standard, linear advice. Manifestors are designed for autonomy, initiating energy, and closed, protective aura dynamics, while your Emotional Authority introduces a continuous, unpredictable wave of feeling.

When processing loss, your path requires honoring your closed aura, working with your emotional wave, and protecting your energy without slipping into non-self isolation.

1. Navigating Energy and the Emotional Wave

• Accept the Unpredictable Wave: With an Emotional (Solar Plexus) Authority, there is no emotional clarity in the moment. Grief will move through you in deep, non-linear waves of highs, lows, and neutral stretches. Forcing yourself to “figure out” how you feel or rushing to process a specific emotion mid-wave will only prolong the turbulence.

• Honor the Manifestor Rest Phase: Manifestors do not have a defined Sacral center to supply consistent, everyday motor energy. You operate in intense bursts of initiation followed by deep rest periods. Grief drains your available energy rapidly; treat the deep exhaustion as a mechanical requirement of your design, not a failure or loss of momentum.

• Release Emotional Transmutation: With your 39/38 and 51/57 gates (Individualism Cross), loss often stirs up intense inner provocation, shock, or existential pressure. Do not force these heavy energies into productivity; allow the shock (Gate 51) to settle without needing to instantly re-organize your life around it.

2. Strategy & Interaction: Informing Through the Pain

• Informing as an Energy-Saver: Your strategy is Informing. Because the Manifestor aura is dense and self-contained, people cannot read your interior state and may misinterpret your grieving silence as anger, detachment, or hostility. Informing clears the field so you can grieve without energetic friction.

• What Informing Looks Like in Grief: You do not need to share your private thoughts or seek permission; you simply state your boundary to keep others from intruding:

  • “I am in a heavy phase of grief today. I’m going offline for the afternoon to rest, and I will text you tomorrow when I’m up for talking.”

  • “I need to leave this gathering now. I’m not upset with anyone; my energy is just drained.”

• Managing the “Anger” Not-Self Theme: When Manifestors feel controlled, interrupted, or forced into unwanted social interactions while grieving, their default non-self reaction is Anger. If you feel sudden bursts of rage, check if a boundary was crossed or if you forgot to inform those around you about your current energetic limits. Your ultimate alignment sign is Peace—which in grief looks like undisturbed, quiet processing.

3. Solitude vs. Interaction: When to Be Around Others

• When to Be Alone: As a Manifestor, your aura needs privacy to reset and clear out conditioning from defined Sacral people. You need deep, undisturbed solitude, especially in your ideal environment (Caves—cozy, enclosed, safe, low-stimulation spaces where you control who enters and exits).

• When to Be Around Others: Seek company only when you feel a spontaneous pull to be near life without having to perform for it. Your 5/1 profile carries a projection field (others project high expectations or dynamic “fix-it” roles onto you). Grieving while subject to other people’s expectations will exhaust you. Choose interactions where you can simply be without managing anyone else’s feelings.

4. Healing Rest vs. Avoidance: How to Tell the Difference

If this interests you, use the prompt directly below.

Based on my Human Design type [see attached pdf], and what that type needs in terms of energy, rest, decision-making, and how I’m meant to interact with the world, what are some specific ways I might move through grief that would actually work with my design instead of against it? I’m not looking for generic grief advice. I want you to think specifically about what my type needs when it comes to processing loss, when to be around others versus alone, and how I might know the difference between resting in a way that’s healing for my design and avoiding in a way that isn’t.

Also if you want to expand on this further, here are a few questions, if you want somewhere to start. Sit with one, or all three. There’s no order they need to go in.

Where in my life have I been overriding my design to meet someone else’s expectation of how I should be grieving?

What have I been calling wrong about myself that might just be my design?

What am I still trying to control about my grief instead of letting it move on its own timing?

Knowing my design didn’t take any of my grief or pain away. It just gave me somewhere to stand inside of it. You cannot force sunlight. You cannot wish the rain away. All you can do is reorient to it.

What did you find when you sat with your human design and these questions? I want to know, reply and tell me.

Despite thinking about him all the time. Despite feeling different emotions circle through my chest whenever I picture his face, sometimes sadness, other times bittersweet, disbelief still, even over a year later. It’s interesting, I see his face and I’m never once angry. I just picture his smile lighting up, the twinkle in his eyes.

So when I spent this spring go, go, go, I kept thinking: is this what happens, you just dissociate? I know people talk about waves of grief, and yeah, I’m very functioning but my waves were small the last few months. People on calls probably have no idea what I’m carrying, because my being is still light. Before, I was a dark cloud. Now I feel lighter. So why can’t I release any of this?

But then I’d think back to when my brother first died, telling my therapist my “upcoming plans,” (lol, brother dies and the girl still has a planned calendar.) She basically told me it wouldn’t be until I’m fully settled that my nervous system could relax, which most likely required being one place for at least a few months, that I’d be able to process viscerally the emotions coming up.

And that’s exactly what happened.

After coming back from the movies on Thursday night (we saw The Invite, great movie, a rollercoaster of emotions as well), I got home and started playing loud music on the speakers. I intentionally put on the playlist of two songs I made after my brother died, because they were the only two songs I could listen to, and honestly, I still really like listening to them.

The first song I heard was in a coffee shop the morning after I found out he had died: “Work Song” by Hozier. I can close my eyes and picture that scene perfectly. Sitting on the bench by the window of a coffee shop near Borough Market in London, tears streaming down my face, my boyfriend next to me, both of us wondering: what will we do?

The second song found me after one of the first workouts we went to after he died, in a dark room in downtown Boston with neon lights: “Ordinary” by Alex Warren.

I've never really paid close attention to the lyrics of either song. What stood out was the raw emotion in their voices, something cracked and unguarded underneath the melody. The ache that brought forth a feeling I couldn't even name, moving through my body.

So that night, home from the movie, playlist on, I started washing the pile of dishes I’d let accumulate all week, and I thought to myself: wow, I am so proud of how far I’ve come.

And then I just finally broke down.

How fucked up is it, to feel a mixture like that. Proud that I’m surviving, almost thriving, after my brother died. Like I had to “go through this tragedy” and rise like a fucking phoenix. So cue the ugly tears. The heavy sobs. Laying on the kitchen floor. The half screams. Mascara running down my face.

Charley, my pup, was a little confused. He thought I wanted to play (in all fairness, when I’m on the ground, it’s usually because we are playing), so he kept pouncing on me and I was like, Charley, read the room. C’mon.

But then he got it, and gave me many licks, his love language, which is usually cute until you see the places he puts his face, and then you have two choices: be okay with it, or get utterly grossed out. Almost always I choose the first.

So there I was, on the ground, with the heart-wrenching sobs, the ones I had last year, the ones that overcame me every single day after Sebastian died in the months that followed. In the shower. In the car. On the side of the street. On the bus.

And it was almost a relief to have that wave come through me again, because I knew it had been holding so much more underneath all the layers of just going about my life, of being so occupied with my day to day. The raw, visceral pain of your heart being ripped out of your body doesn’t get anywhere to go besides back in when your body doesn’t feel safe enough to release it.

After I cried, I felt a lighter, And immediately after, I was emotionally exhausted.

But what I've come to is this: these moments of utter collapse, these times I fall to the ground, I do not want any witness. I do not need one. I am my own witness.

Which brings me to the third song, the one I keep playing on repeat: “Stumble” by Kilimanjaro.

After I got up off the floor, I put it on and started dancing (afro house does this to me every time, no matter my mood… no shame). I grabbed Charley’s paws and we swayed, back and forth, bounced back and forth, and I began laughing, this time the tears streaming down my face were heartbreak and joy tangled together.

I can’t help but think of my recent trip to Colorado, where we met up with one of my college friends, Anna. She gifted me a pair of socks that said “who rescued who?”, and I thought it was the perfect gift.

Truly, who rescued who? They say you get the dog you need, not the dog you want, and the list of how Charley has helped me over the last six months just keeps growing.

During this trip, I also kept coming back to a core memory I have of Anna and Sebastian, my brother.

We were in NYC before another college friend’s wedding, and Anna met up with my family and me. She and her then-fiance, now husband (who we all adore, yay when your best friends marry great people!) had just gotten back from a year of traveling around the world.

When I told Sebastian this, his eyes lit up. I remember how excited he got and how he started asking Anna so many questions. I remember that moment so clearly, and seeing Anna now, for the first time since Sebastian died, it was bittersweet.

Her husband, her, and I, while my boyfriend was on an extreme trail run battling high altitude and moose in velvet, decided to put on a TV show. About half way through we began talking about Sebastian. I could tell how her husband wanted to address “it”, and when I finally was able to open up “the topic”, almost as if giving permission to “go there”, we did.

It was hard.

Sometimes surface level feels easier, but I'm glad we ventured into the depth we did. He had lost his father five years earlier to cancer, and again, while there were no parallels in how they died, we still experienced the same tragedy. The loss of a loved one.

So that brings me to today.

How can I continue writing about grief over and over again?

What are you, as my reader, supposed to expect each time This is Grief pops into your inbox?

Part of me wonders if anyone thinks, we get it, your brother died, move on. But the other part of me knows there’s an unsubscribe button at the end of every email, and that’s allowed. This isn’t a newsletter for everyone.

But as this griefy passion project evolves and evolves, I figured I’d give myself some structure, and give you something to look forward to. I needed to become a little more organized (which, me, being a rising Capricorn, I love to do).

So here are the four areas I will always come back to. Not because grief only has four rooms, it has infinite rooms, but because these are the ones I keep finding myself visiting.

Sibling grief and sudden death

This is where it starts. Losing Sebastian without warning, without a goodbye, sucked. Sucks. Is awful. Truly. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. It’s painful, disorienting, confusing. It literally messes up your brain chemistry.

Sibling grief is its own particular kind of lonely because almost nobody talks about it. People check on the parents. People check on the partner/spouse. Almost no one asks how it feels to lose the person who knew you before you even knew yourself.

This is the memory of Anna and Sebastian in NYC. This is Charley, the rescue pup curled up between my legs while I think about my brother who never got to meet him, and Charley, who might not know who I’m grieving, knows when I come home a little sad and need more affection and physical touch. This is the part of my story I know from the inside, and I’m not going to soften it so it’s easier to read.

Sitting with other people’s grief

I talk to other grievers. Not to pry into their lives or ask “what happened,” but because I know what it felt like to not have the words, and I want to help other people find theirs.

This is also where I get honest about how broken the systems around grief actually are. The bereavement leave that is three, maybe five days of paid leave if you’re lucky.

The advice to move on. The silence people get handed instead of company. Anna’s husband lost his father to cancer, nothing like how I lost Sebastian, and yet the loss lived in the same room. That’s what this is all about. Finding the people whose grief doesn’t match mine on paper but somehow still speaks the same language.

Turning grief into purpose

This might be triggering for people. But for me this is the area that’s allowed me to move away from suffering. Loss doesn’t just take. For a lot of people, eventually, it becomes the raw material for transformation. A new direction, a mission, a way of living that wouldn’t exist without the breaking. I write about the people doing this on purpose, and about my own slow version of it.

And while I’d much rather have my brother alive with me, living out the years that I still feel I got robbed of, when I see the rest of my life with two paths and wonder: if I take one road, filled with turns and twists of resentment, anger, fear, and hatred, or if I take another one, filled with love, interest in the unseen and the mystical, how will my life change.

And just to be clear, despite me living my life, I miss my brother every single day. I think about him probably every single minute. His face crosses my mind all the time, and it takes choosing every hour of the day, can I get through this, how do I move through this (note, move through, not move on), so that I can bring more joy into my life.

And the joy does not replace the sadness, but as I move about the world with a gaping hole in my chest, the hole does not get smaller, but the love that surrounds it gets larger (my friend said something similar to this right when my brother died, since her younger brother died several years before, and now I finally understand it).

Life, death, and the lens I see it all through

This is the most me, because it is through my lived experience that I see the world in this way. My spirituality, the way I make sense of mortality and meaning now, and how losing my brother rearranged the way I live, the friendships I have, and what I do.

How I think about aging. Beauty. Purpose. The decision, made over and over, to keep loving a life that got permanently altered.

So here’s what all of this means for you.

Some weeks you'll get words that are raw and specific to my interpretation of what it was like to have my brother Sebastian die and the ripple effect it had. Some weeks you'll hear someone else's story. Some weeks an uncomfortable truth about grief nobody says out loud will land in your inbox. And some weeks you'll just get me with my unfiltered thoughts, most likely sprinkled in with some humor because I've found that despite it not being funny at all to have someone you love die, sometimes the only way to add lightness is to laugh at how awful it all is.

P.S. I wrote this and didn’t send myself a test email because it’s getting to be my bedtime and I am scheduling this post for the AM and wanted to sneak in a few more chapters of a new book I picked up in Leadville, Colorado :) i won’t share the name of the book because it would probably upset my mother but if you want a good non-fiction novel about a woman in the 1890s, dm me ;)

Thanks again for being here. <3

Then my brother died, and it stopped being abstract. Somewhere in the middle of losing him, my fear of dying slowly disappeared. And I noticed something else, too: our society does not know how to talk about death.

We know how to talk around it. The casseroles, the “so sorry for your loss,” the flowers that show up the first few weeks and then nothing. What we don’t know how to do is sit with someone in the actual mess of it, the anger, the guilt, the weird relief, the jealousy of people who still have their person, for longer than a week or two. And grievers know it. It’s why so many of us go quiet.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about grief unless you spend hours reading books, searching online asking “is it just me,” or actually living it: it’s not one feeling, it’s dozens of them, most of which don’t have easy descriptors, and almost none of which feel socially acceptable to say out loud.

I was angry for the first six months after my brother died. Not sad-angry. I wanted to throw things, yell, scream, punch shit. Actually angry. At friends who disappeared, at people who said the wrong thing, at the unfairness of a life that kept moving for everyone else. I didn’t know how to say that without feeling like a bad griever. So I wrote it down instead. And it turned out I wasn’t the only one who needed permission to be angry. And it’s often that anger is actually a secondary emotion, one that acts as a defense mechanism or a shield that covers up more vulnerable, painful primary feelings beneath the surface, such as sadness, hurt, fear, or powerlessness.

That’s the pattern I keep finding, in my own writing and in every conversation I have with someone who’s lost a person. The emotions that feel the most shameful to admit are almost always the most universal. The jealousy. The relief when the suffering ends. The numbness that shows up instead of tears. The way you can be fine for months and then get wrecked by a song in a grocery store. People carry it in isolation, feeling self-conscious that they’re “still” grieving because society told them they should be over it.

I first learned this lesson with my own body, years before I ever needed it for grief. I used to have health symptoms doctors couldn’t heal, and the thing that actually helped wasn’t another supplement or specialist. It was finally sitting down and asking what my body was feeling that I hadn’t let myself feel. Once I stopped trying so hard to heal and started actually naming what was underneath, physically and emotionally, things started to shift.

Writing about grief writing turned out to be the same muscle. You don’t get through it by managing it from a distance. You get through it by naming the specific, ugly, unglamorous thing that’s actually happening in you.

I was always called too sensitive. Too much. I spent years not quite fitting in anywhere, feeling like my reactions were bigger than everyone else's, like something was wrong with how much I felt things. Now I'm realizing that sensitivity, that emotional attunement, is actually my biggest strength. It's not that I've become less sensitive, it's that I've learned to use it in a way that makes me powerful instead of powerless.

I'm not interested in being liked by everyone anymore. I still want to help people, I just don't need their approval to do it. Nor do I need to feel bad because my opinion and lived experience don't match theirs. As long as it's done with kindness and respect, there's no need to shrink myself into a more palatable version just to keep others happy. And that might sound crass or direct, which, yes, I am very direct, but life is too short to keep softening the versions of yourself just because others don't agree with them.

That’s part of why I’m writing so honestly on Substack and beginning to build these interviews with other grievers, to give other people the same permission I finally gave myself: to say the unfiltered, uncensored, occasionally ugly version instead of the more socially appropriate one. It’s slower work than I expected. It’s not therapy and I’m not a grief specialist, I want to be clear about that.

What I can do is sit across from someone, ask the questions that let them say the thing they haven’t said out loud yet, and write it down in a way that makes another griever somewhere feel less alone. Tears get shed in almost every conversation. And then, strangely, I feel happy afterward. Happy in a sad, twisted kind of way. That contradiction is basically the whole subject of this little griefy passion project.

So if you’re grieving, or supporting someone who is, here’s what I want you to walk away with: whatever you’re feeling that you haven’t told anyone, the anger, the relief, the fear, the numbness, the guilt for laughing again, you’re almost certainly not the only one who’s felt it. That’s the entire premise of what I’m doing here. Not to fix grief because it is unfixable, not to explain it away, just to make it a little less lonely by saying the parts out loud that usually get carried in silence.

Thank you for being here.

xx.

It feels weird calling it a passion project, since it’s literally a Substack I created after my brother died, just to be able to process my emotions. But the more I named emotions that other grieving people felt but were sometimes unsure how to say out loud, the more I realized I had become passionate about this.

So yes, a little griefy passion project.

For those who don’t know me, I’m Elena. I grew up in a tight-knit family of four, in a town that looks a bit like a Hallmark movie. I had an easy childhood with supportive parents. My older brother, Sebastian, was my first best friend, and he wasn’t the type of brother who was either too overprotective or mean to me. We just got along. It was as simple as that.

As we got older, despite going down very different paths, him getting into film and activism, me getting into partying and having a good time in Miami, we still had a great friendship. I used to joke that Sebastian was so giving and such a social activist that he made up for my lack of it. We actually enjoyed hanging out with each other. We’d spend summers at our summer house just being outside all day, at the beach, learning to kitesurf, sail, surf.

So many of my core memories are just the mundane with him. Me getting mad at him for stepping on the back of my Rainbows, then getting mad at him again for making me run when I didn’t want to. Probably just me being a hormonal, angsty preteen and teen. But regardless of my quick fuse, Sebastian always knew how to pacify the situation.

I grew up with the kind of privilege that made it feel like nothing could go wrong. I knew, in an abstract way, that other people in our community had losses, had tragedies. But I took our safety for granted, in a way I can see clearly now was never actually guaranteed to any of us.

So off I went to college at the University of Miami and had a very play-hard, study-hard four years, while Sebastian was at Vanderbilt on a full ride for his activism work.

I graduated and joined about fifty of my friends from college in NYC, working corporate jobs, until I had what I called my quarter-life crisis and moved to Barcelona. I spent the next seven years there.

I’d always been a writer and a reader, curious about the world, and writing was always how I expressed myself. I used to have a quick fuse (probably still do, if provoked), but after getting diagnosed with interstitial cystitis in my early twenties in NYC, and having what felt like no choice but to turn inward, I began a long path through meditation, mindfulness, spirituality, anything to figure out why, despite being so seemingly healthy and active, I was suffering with a chronic condition. That’s maybe a whole different Substack one day, but the short version is: I healed, and what did it wasn’t the supplements or the endless doctors’ appointments. It was learning to stop healing so desperately and instead focus on my emotions.

So back to right before my world changed. I was living in Barcelona, freelancing, running a creative messaging studio called Good Words & More, finally on the other side of my health issues, six months into a relationship with my now-boyfriend, doing long distance between Barcelona and Mexico City, and starting a coaching program to grow my business. I was ready for the next chapter.

And then, from one day to the next, the unimaginable happened. The tragedy you naively think could never happen to you, did. And my entire world crumbled.

In the last year, I've done pretty much everything a grief specialist would tell you not to do. The advice is usually: don't make any major changes in the first year after losing someone. Instead, I left Barcelona, moved home to my parents' for the summer, moved to Austin, watched my boyfriend buy a house, adopted a puppy, watched him lose his job.

I went back to freelancing after taking a few months off but actually did another unthinkable twist, I started a full-time job at a startup less than a month ago (that I already love!). I’m beginning a Pilates certification and will start teaching classes in the fall for fun. I used to teach spin classes in Barcelona, and I'm excited to give back again through my love for movement.

But something you should know about me is that I’m a very emotional person with a hard exterior, disciplined, sometimes called cold. So the only way I felt I could get through this was by moving inward. But I quickly realized I needed an outlet.

Everything I’d tried to process my grief with, sibling loss support groups, paired-up grief buddies, didn’t feel like what I needed. So I started writing it out, unfiltered. Naming the unnamable. Being vulnerable, but also critical.

The more I wrote, the more I saw it resonated, with grievers and with people supporting grievers, all over the world. And I realized grief is something our society still has a genuinely hard time holding space for.

So this is my invitation to you: if you’ve lost someone, my heart is with you, and I hope you find some comfort in the way I process my own experience. I’m not a grief specialist and I don’t plan on becoming one. This is just my interpretation of something that feels so isolating, but that will happen to every single one of us in our lifetime.

And to those of you reading who know me, and who knew Sebastian: putting him in past tense still feels wrong, you will always know him. Our lives got a lot dimmer without him in them. We miss his hugs, his smile, him. There’s no sugarcoating it. But I hope with time we can live a little more like he already did, kindness, full attention, the best hugs, always wanting to play. These are the gifts he gave us just by being here, and while nothing replaces him, I hope we can carry his legacy forward with us.

If you’ve made it this far, hi, hello. Thank you for being here. This is going to be a place for naming the things about grief nobody quite knows how to say out loud, and I’m glad you’re in it with me.

With love,

Elena

After that there was always another one. Hurricane Katrina, when I was old enough to understand that people were dying partly due to a natural disaster but also partly due to poor response, levees that failed because they were never built to withstand a storm that size, and a federal response that took days to reach people stranded on their own rooftops. Sandy Hook, which broke families and people across the country that I don’t think people ever recovered from. How could you?

COVID, which was different only in that it happened slowly enough for us to watch the number climb every day, a body count updated like a stock ticker, until the majority of the world moved on.

And now, this year, an earthquake in Venezuela that has killed thousands and left tens of thousands more unaccounted for, a place I have never been, filled with people I will never meet, and still I feel it land somewhere in my chest when I read the numbers and think of all the people who are still missing.

Even as I write this, there is a fire burning outside Leadville, Colorado, a town we were supposed to spend a week in beginning tomorrow. The fire started over a week ago and has grown past four thousand acres, and as of today, there is no reported loss of human life. But somewhere in those burning acres are animals who couldn’t outrun what was coming, an entire stand of trees that took root long before I was born, gone in a matter of days. And there are many more, even much larger fires, burning across multiple states right now too.

It’s a different register of collective loss, one without a headline count of the dead, instead it’s the amount of acres burning, but a collective loss all the same. Which makes me wonder if loss on this scale doesn’t need a person attached to it at all. Maybe it’s simply what happens when a form of life that took decades to grow or gather is destroyed faster than it could ever be replaced.

I know what it feels like to lose one person. My brother died, and it completely cracked open my heart, and the experience of what grief is actually like. So when I try to imagine losing everyone, losing a home and a community and a family all in the same afternoon, I can’t get anywhere near it. I sit at the edge of that thought for a moment, and then I have to step back, because it is too large to even comprehend.

These emotions are what I keep circling around.

Collective loss is not new.

It has never been new. We had this before television, before the internet, before anyone thought to give it a name. Plagues emptied cities across centuries, over and over. World wars erased entire generations of young men in a handful of years. Polio moved through towns and left children in braces, or in graves. We are not living through events unprecedented. Yes, they each have different flavors to them, different countries affected, sometimes different socioeconomic classes, other times not. But us as humans experiencing collective losses is not new.

What I think we call adaptation is not a new “feature” that humans know how to do. It’s not a modern coping mechanism we invented. It’s the oldest tool we have. Human beings have always had to find a way to keep going while catastrophe was happening somewhere close enough to touch them, and somehow we kept walking forward, kept having children, kept building homes, communities, and infrastructures that could eventually be destroyed again.

I used to think of that as resilience. Now I’m not sure it isn’t something closer to a fracture, one that never fully closes, one we’ve just learned to live around so completely that we forget it’s there until something reopens it.

Every headline like Venezuela’s reopens it again, just for a moment, before the reflex of protection pulls me back.

Because there is only so much a person can feel. That’s the part nobody says out loud.

I am the kind of person who feels emotions deeply, who can sit with someone else’s pain until it becomes almost indistinguishable from my own, and even I have found myself closing off lately, needing to focus on other areas of life. The part of life that gives, that grows, that expands. Not because I don’t care.

Because caring, fully, about every loss the world hands you in a single week, is not something a body can sustain. I don’t think that closing off is wrong. It’s a survival instinct.

I think it might be the same instinct that let a mother in 1918 bury a child from influenza and still get up the next morning to tend to the ones still living. To the 26-year-old man who learned his sister and stepmother were found dead on a Sunday morning after the quake, and he’s behind the plate for the LA Dodgers that same afternoon for his MLB debut. I think it’s the same instinct that let anyone, anywhere, survive a war. Survive a loss that ripples in and out of your home, your community, your country.

I don’t have a resolution for this, and I’m not sure I’m looking for one. I open myself to the world’s grief, and then I close myself off from it, and then some new tragedy pulls me back open again, and I don’t think that cycle ever stops. I don’t think it’s supposed to.

We adapt because we have always had to adapt, long before any of us noticed we were doing it. The adapting doesn’t mean the pain goes away. It just means we’ve found a way to keep carrying it as we still keep living our lives. One foot in front of the other, and most days, that has to be enough.

Share This is grief

We had never met in person yet here we were, wasting no time to get into the depths of our grief.

She was facetiming from Asheville, North Carolina, where she had moved back a few years ago when her father got sick. I was in Austin, having just gotten back from my trip to the Northeast.

We had found each other the way most meaningful things seem to find me lately — through a chain of connections: a mutual friend, a creativity retreat in Costa Rica, my friend Holly who knew us both, originally through our friend Preston.

Holly had suggested we speak. And so we did, on a Wednesday morning while the mosquitoes were already out in Texas and the sun had not yet turned punishing. I grew up in the Northeast, where mosquitoes are an afternoon problem. Here they don’t wait. Eden was outside in Asheville, taking in the quiet before her day started, reveling in the fact that her mosquitos wouldn’t arrive until 4:30.

I had reached out to Eden because she had created a grief card deck with her sister — questions designed to open conversations that most people spend their lives avoiding. But what I didn’t know, before we started talking, was that she would give me something more useful than any card: a contrast. A mirror held at just enough of an angle that I could finally see the shape of my own loss more clearly.

Her father died three years ago. She had two years of warning. She packed up her life in Colorado, moved home, said everything she needed to say — a thousand times over, she told me. She was there when he died. She got to be there. Sebastian passed in April one afternoon after a surf day went wrong. I got a phone call and spent 24 hours traveling home. I chose never to see his body, his vessel, and that’s a choice I’ve never regretted.

I had spent a lot of time wondering whether anticipatory grief is easier. Whether having the chance to say goodbye softens what comes after, or whether it just spreads the pain across a longer timeline. Eden didn’t let me stay in that comparison for long. “I don’t have to do a lot of mental gymnastics that you have been tasked with,” she said. “But I recognize I got to say everything a thousand times to my dad. I got to be present. Those were hard things that are also gifts.” She paused. “I don’t remember where I was going with that sentence.”

What resonated most during my talk with Eden was not her loss itself as our losses are “very different experiences,” but the philosophy she had built around it. She told me that when her family spread her father’s ashes in Montana — at a fly fishing spot he had loved, surrounded by his family — a woman from a neighboring campsite walked over and told them she was a medium. That she never did this but she just had to tell them what was coming through. She said things that were specific enough to matter: that their father felt he didn’t deserve all the celebration, that he was grateful but a little embarrassed by the fuss. That he wasn’t in one thing, he was in everything.

The woman got back in her car and drove away without leaving a business card.

Eden’s brother called it a swindler’s trick. Her mother was in too much pain to receive it. And Eden and her sisters stood there at a campsite in Montana and made a decision that I recognized immediately, because I had made it too, alone in my parents’ bedroom in August, four months after Sebastian died, watching a Swedish Angel chimes candle start to move on its own with no flame beneath it. Every window was shut. There was no A/C vent on, or summer breeze sneaking through the doorway, no explanation that would have satisfied anyone looking for one.

You can choose connection or you can choose coincidence. You will never know the mysteries of the universe either way.

I don’t believe in coincidences. I never have, and grief has only made that conviction more certain. Less something I need to argue for and more something I simply live inside of..

Eden put it more plainly than I could have: “I am always going to choose the thing that makes me feel more connected instead of brushing it off.”

And I think this is what she and I share most, beneath all the ways our losses differ. Not the same grief, not the same timeline, not even the same kind of goodbye. But the same refusal to let grief drain the color out of life, make it grim and dim.

Eden said it better than I could: that our society has no idea how to hold the gray between the black and white — and that connection, creativity, and wonderment are how we learn to touch it. How we zoom out of our personal experience into a larger one.

There is a version of grief that closes everything down. That makes the world feel mechanical and indifferent, that turns every unanswered question into evidence of absence. I understand that version. I have visited it. But I do not live there, and neither does Eden, and I think that is not an accident. I think it is a choice we are both making, consciously, every day — sometimes several times a day — to stay permeable. To keep the door open even when it’s exhausting to do so.

She said something else that has stayed with me. We were talking about the people who didn’t show up — the friends who went quiet, who didn’t know what to say and so said nothing — and I asked her whether she had given them grace or simply let them go. She thought about it for a long moment. “It’s actually hard for me to reach for and remember,” she said finally. “Maybe I’ve just recalibrated those friendships already.”

I wrote that down. Recalibrated. Not ended, not grieved, not forgiven, recalibrated. Like an instrument that needs adjusting after something shifts the conditions around it. I have been doing this too, without having a word for it. Re-measuring the distances between myself and people I used to feel close to. Finding that some of them have grown and that I am, mostly, at peace with that.

Grief does not only ask you to mourn the person you lost. It asks you to mourn certain versions of your other relationships too, the ones that couldn’t hold the weight of what happened, the ones that revealed themselves to be built for easier weather.

I have thought about this often — what I would have done with two years. Where we would have gone, what we would have said. Another solo trip together, maybe, or one with our partners. But when I sit with it honestly, I don’t think anything was left unsaid. He knew I loved him. I know he was proud of me. What I am grieving is not the words I didn’t get to say — it’s the time I assumed we had. The decades I took for granted. The version of the future where he was still in it. And so the work now is not closure, exactly. It is reorientation. Learning to navigate a life whose coordinates have permanently shifted.

Near the end of our conversation, Eden asked if I wanted to pull a card for Sebastian. I said yes before I could talk myself out of it.

She disappeared from the screen for a moment and came back with the deck. She told me to tell her when to stop. I watched her hands move through the cards and said now, and she turned it over and read it aloud.

How have you and your life changed without having them in your life?

I sat with that for a moment. The deck ranges from light to heavy, Eden told me, and I had landed on one of the heavier ones.

I told her about Barcelona. About seven years of a life I built there, picked up and left behind in the aftermath of April. About Austin, which has become my new home and it feels weird since Sebastian would always visit me every time I moved. About my boyfriend, who met my parents the day after Sebastian died and never got to meet my brother at all — who now exists in a version of my life that Sebastian never got to know, which is its own particular strangeness. About getting a dog. About all the ways the architecture of my days has changed and how difficult it is to know which changes were mine and which ones grief made for me.

But what came out, underneath all of that, was something simpler.

What I miss most is our connection. Sending him memes on Instagram, mainly ones about our parents. The ones that only made sense to us because we were the only two people who had grown up inside that particular family, with that particular mother and father, with those particular inside jokes accumulated over thirty years of a shared life. He was the only other person who saw our family the way I saw it. And without him, that perspective — our perspective — exists only in me now. Half of the archive is gone.

I told Eden this and she nodded. “Your life has become a little more insular,” she said, “because that thread has had to shift.”

Yes. That is exactly it. Not smaller, necessarily. But more insular. More interior. The outward-facing parts of me still work — I still show up, still connect, still write — but there is a room inside that used to have two people in it and now only has one. I have been learning to sit in that room alone. Some days it feels like solitude. Other days it feels like what it is.

Eden also said that grieving doesn’t mean suffering. That you can be grieving and still be happy. That these are not contradictions. I have believed this for a while but have been reluctant to say it plainly, worried it would sound like I have moved on, or healed, or finished — none of which are true. But Eden gave me permission, in the way that only a stranger can, to say it without apology: I am grieving and I am also fine and enjoying my life. Both of those can be real and true. Neither cancels the other out.

She told me before we hung up that connecting with people about grief was one of the gifts her father had given her. That she keeps a running list. That I was on it now.

I think Sebastian would have found that beautiful. He had a way of collecting people, of making friendships that lasted. And he was always giving gifts — the kind you could hold, and the kind you couldn’t. Some of my favorite objects in the world came from him. But now, in his absence, the gifts keep coming in a different form.

P.S. Eden’s A Seat at the Table: Connective Card Deck is available for purchase on her website :)

Sebastian died on a Saturday. By Monday, we were at a notary.

I won’t say what for. I’m not sure I fully understood it then, and I’m not sure the specifics matter now. What matters is the timing. What matters is that grief does not get a grace period. The paperwork doesn’t wait for you to catch your breath. The system — legal, financial, institutional — simply moves forward and expects you to move with it, regardless of what your body is doing, regardless of what you can hold.

What I watched my father do in those weeks was something I don’t have a clean word for. It wasn’t strength, exactly. It was more like a kind of shutdown. You close the door on the part of you that is a father who just lost his son, because that part cannot make phone calls to banks. That part cannot find the account number. That part cannot answer the question what is your relationship to the deceased without falling apart completely. So you close it off. You become functional. You get it done. And somewhere in the getting it done, something breaks in you that doesn’t show itself until much later.

This is what we ask of grieving people in this country. Not rest. Not witness. Not time. We ask for paperwork.

And now I think about what that paperwork has become. Because my father wasn’t only navigating the financial accounts — the banks, the attorneys, the official machinery of a life being legally unwound. He was also confronting Sebastian’s digital life. The phone. The email. The accumulated presence of a person who had, like all of us, been quietly building an enormous life online without ever thinking about what would happen to it.

None of us think about it.

There are roughly 30 million Facebook accounts that currently belong to people who are dead. Ninety percent of Americans have made no plan for what happens to their digital lives after they die. Not because they’re careless, but because no one asks us to. We are handed no framework. The platforms themselves have policies — Google has something called an Inactive Account Manager; Apple has a Legacy Contact program; Facebook allows for memorialization — but you have to have set these up in advance, when death still feels abstract and far away. If you didn’t, your family inherits the chaos. Each platform runs its own bureaucracy, demands its own documents, operates on its own timeline. And they don’t speak to each other.

So there is my father, in the worst weeks of his life, submitting death certificates to institutions that each want them in slightly different formats, waiting for responses that may or may not come, navigating a terrain that no one warned him about and no one helped him cross.

And now, as I begin to accumulate more stuff, both physically and digitally, I can’t stop thinking about how much we leave behind.

There was a time when the artifacts of a life were physical. Photo books. Letters. Maybe a journal, if you were that kind of person. Finite. Holdable. You could go through a box in an afternoon, choose what to keep, decide what to grieve over and what to let go. The shape of a person’s absence was bounded by what they had made and owned and accumulated.

Now it’s infinite. Or it feels that way. Every photo ever taken lives somewhere in the cloud. Every email ever sent is archived. Every search, every like, every half-finished note to self. We have optimized relentlessly for preservation without once asking whether preservation is always the right instinct. Without asking what we’re actually preserving it for, or who gets to decide.

And here is the thing that keeps me up at night, the thing that feels almost too strange to say out loud: those servers are running. Right now, the digital remains of millions of people are sitting in data centers consuming energy, drawing power, generating heat. The cloud has a larger carbon footprint than the entire airline industry. A single data center uses the electricity equivalent of 50,000 homes. And a not-insignificant portion of what those data centers are holding is the accumulated digital lives of people who are no longer alive to use them, photos no living person can access, emails that will never be answered, storage that keeps renewing because no one thought to cancel it.

We are grieving in ways that hum. Somewhere in a data center, the photos and emails and voice memos of people who are gone are drawing electricity right now, at this moment, kept alive by servers that don’t know the difference between the living and the dead. I don’t say this to assign guilt to anyone who has ever loved a person and wanted to hold onto every trace of them. I say it because it seems like exactly the kind of thing we are not supposed to notice, in the same way we are not supposed to notice that the system forces a mother to wait to see her son’s body until business hours are open.

I still haven’t looked at the videos of Sebastian.

I know they’re there in my icloud. I know that if a scroll back far enough in the cloud, there is a living, moving, laughing version of my brother — his voice exactly as I remember it, his face in motion, being himself in the way only video now can replicate. I’m not ready. I don’t know when I will be. Maybe that’s its own answer to the question this essay is circling: sometimes the mercy isn’t access. Sometimes the mercy is that you get to choose when you’re ready.

But my father didn’t get to choose. And most families don’t. They are handed a phone and a laptop, sometimes nothing at all, and left to guess at login credentials, at account numbers, at what even exists. And the world keeps asking them to keep moving, and there is no one standing at the door saying: you don’t have to do this today. This part can wait.

Sebastian was surprisingly, extraordinarily organized, and his digital life was too. But even still, it was so hard.

It should be able to wait.

We need to build more systems — legal ones, digital ones, cultural ones — that let it wait. That protect the privacy of the dead and the grief of the living. That don’t ask a father to become a system administrator in the same week he is identifying his son’s body.

We optimized for accumulation. We forgot to think about passage. And so it all stays. The photos. The emails. The voice memos. Held in servers we will never visit, in buildings we will never see, drawing power from a grid that doesn’t know it is also, in its way, a graveyard.

On Friday, I went to my first memorial service since Sebastian died last year.

It was a joint service for my great-aunt and great-uncle, who passed away this past year at 89 and 93, respectively, surrounded by their family and loved ones after many decades of shared love and growth together. That’s the ideal lifespan we all hope to achieve. And in contrast to Sebastian’s life, which was cut short by society’s standards, an extraordinarily long one.

I couldn’t help but wonder, as we sat in those church pews and listened to the story of their long lives — did people feel bad for us? For our loved one who died without his family surrounding him, at least fifty years too soon?

Sitting between my parents, it felt wrong to be a family of three at these types of gatherings. We were supposed to be a family of four with Sebastian.

Being back in the same church grounds where, almost a year ago, we held his memorial service felt off in a way I couldn’t articulate. But there was something that felt comforting, too. Seeing so many people I had grown up with over summers, the familiarity of their faces, their voices, their hugs. And knowing that my great-aunt and great-uncle, despite their declining health, had come to Sebastian’s memorial, I wanted to be there for theirs. Even if it meant taking a red-eye from Phoenix the day before after three very full days of onboarding.

One of my cousin’s fathers — the last time I’d seen him was at Sebastian’s service — said something like, so good to see you, even under these circumstances. We have to stop meeting at funerals.

And of course, he was right. But it’s hard to make time for the kind of family gatherings we used to have when our parents were the ones in charge of our schedules. Our to-do lists at twelve years old were not what they are now.

Moving through the cemetery — which is, honestly, an extremely beautiful one, the kind with very old trees, uneven headstones, and a stillness that, even with a soft breeze and distant sound of the ocean, feels comforting instead of eerie — I found myself reading the names and dates of many headstones, wondering about the lives of the people who had been laid to rest below them.

How each of these people lived.

Whether they felt fulfilled.

Whether the length of their lives matched the depth.

Most had lived what the world would call a decent amount of time. However, some had not.

Sebastian’s headstone hasn’t been set up yet. In its place, a rose bush. I edged around that part of the cemetery, not ready to go too close. The memories of his service were ones I had carefully compartmentalized, and I wasn’t ready to unpack them there, at least not yet.

So instead, I found my older cousin, another constant in my life growing up, despite sometimes going years without seeing each other, and we did what we tend to do now, when the reality of a situation is so dark you have to find the light in it — we resorted to humor.

We imagined a dark comedy sketch set in the afterlife, where everyone buried in that cemetery was somehow living together in eternity, variously excited, disappointed, and annoyed by their neighbors. The new arrivals. The long-timers. The ones who had strong opinions about the seating arrangements. It was more entertaining than the small talk, which — as someone who is more introverted than extroverted, and more sensitive than most people realize — drains me faster than I’d like.

I love a small, deep conversation, but back-to-back surface ones leave me hollow. I’ve come to accept that about myself, instead of wishing it were different.

So back on the train, heading into the city, I sat with all of the feelings that came with the last 48 hours I spent in my summer town. Thinking of my great-uncle and great-aunt with their long lives. And thinking about Sebastian's shorter one, all while remembering the time we spent growing up there together. Even bringing to mind the last memory I had with Sebastian and my great-aunt and -uncle all together, chatting on the porch two years ago.

And instead of collapsing into the comparison, the unfairness of the gap between 93 and 35, I found myself thinking about something else: the people who show up.

I’ve said many times, in the months after Sebastian died, that many people didn’t continue showing up. And I still believe that, there were people who I feel like should have shown up more for our family.

But sitting in that church, I was reminded that though we might not always be in constant communication with our family members or view the world the same way, our extended family (our grandparents’ cousins, their kids, their kids’ kids = my cousins, aka the people who witnessed us growing up each year) who despite having little in common, and almost never intentionally planning to see each other anymore, still show up when it matters most.

They might not be the people you’d invite to your wedding, and there are no hard feelings about it; that’s just how it is. But when someone dies, they come. They put on their good clothes and they drive hours, they fly across the country, and they sit with you in the pews. And that, to me, that’s one way of showing up.

And while I sit on this train, delayed another hour, I think about how tomorrow I will be meeting my best friend’s second baby, born just two weeks ago.

I sit with both edges of life this weekend. Two lives of nearly nine decades, fully lived and closed with family and friends nearby. And a life only two weeks old, barely begun.

We always think we have more time. More time for the things we always say we'll get to, to travel to the places we long for, to call the people we love.

We save up for one week a year — a vacation we’ve idealized for months — and return to the same life we left, having barely exhaled. Most likely feeling more tired than before.

What if instead we were more intentional with each day? Not in a performative way, not in a way that requires grand gestures. Just, noticing each day to its fullest. Being a little more present to the specific texture of a Saturday.

My great-aunt and -uncle seemed to understand that. They were involved in their communities, patient with each other, and present for the people around them. And Sebastian — despite his life being cut short in every way the world measures — lived fully, in my eyes. Not fully in terms of length. Fully in terms of doing what he loved, finding ways to make his daily life a little better, a little richer. He was content in a way that I think few of us are. I don’t doubt he thought he had more time. We all do.

So today, I sat outside the station during the delay and felt the sun on my face and let it be enough. I slowly ate an entire bag of cheesy puffs on the Amtrak as I stared out the window, listening to the sound of the train chug along the tracks.

Earlier, I had met up with a close friend for just forty minutes before boarding my train and left feeling full in a way that would make me smile back on it for months. We saw a stunning black butterfly and marveled in its beauty, and then we passed a house that had a colorful mailbox, painted and decorated. How simple yet how beautiful.

I think back to how, at the memorial service reception, I caught the eyes of another set of cousins’ parents across a crowded reception, walked over, we hugged, spoke for a minute, and after I walked away, felt, inexplicably, happier for having seen them.

This is what it comes back to, for me: doing what feels good and seeing the people who make you feel good.

Not endlessly — not at the cost of yourself — but intentionally.

Choosing those small moments on purpose.

There’s a difference between having a pessimistic outlook and simply going through the motions.

I know what it is to go through the motions. To be in a job you don’t want, a dynamic you’re tired of, a version of yourself you’ve outgrown.

Sometimes the honest question to ask yourself is: what here can I actually change? And if I can’t change it right now, what can I begin to see differently — so that I’m not suffering through every day until I can? Because imagining being unhappy every single day, and then dying, that’s not how I want to live.

And in my belief system, you’d probably be reincarnated and have to do it all over again until you finally decided to make a change on 1) either how you see the world or 2) how you move about the world.

So yes, I have a hard time with constant complaining. Trust me, I do it too. I catch myself, I backslide, I catch myself again. But there’s something about the daily chorus of grievance that exhausts me. Maybe in a way that’s selfish because it’s easier for me to tune out the noise and the atrocities that are happening because it’s not happening in my backyard.

And yes, the world right now is genuinely difficult. The news is genuinely awful. But rehearsing that awfulness out loud every day doesn’t change it, it just makes you and everyone around you feel worse.

Two different Uber drivers in Phoenix, on separate mornings, told me I had great energy when I got in the car. It was probably because I was on my way to a new job and buzzing with that particular kind of nervous excitement. And it proved that the way you carry yourself is contagious. It moves through the air, and people feel it before you’ve said a word.

After loss — especially loss that is sudden and unfair and far too early — you have every right to be angry at the world. I’m not dismissing that, but there’s a difference between honoring that grief and choosing, for the rest of your life, to live inside it.

Between letting the hard part make you hard, and letting it — eventually, slowly, imperfectly — make you more awake to the beauty of what’s left.

What I’ve found helpful, for my own life: is getting off the news and getting into nature.

Being very, very intentional about where and with who I put and share my energy. Life is too short to be grumpy and angry when you could sit outside and watch the sun rise and set, day after day, until one day, inevitably, one of those sunrises or sunsets will be the last one you see.

Whether that's at ninety-three or thirty-five, I hope you don't look back and wish you'd spent more days at peace than at war with the world.

I hope you sipped your favorite drink from your favorite cup, and I hope you felt the sun on your face whenever you could.