Nonsequitur Life

It has been one full year since Joe died.

November 4, 2022.

It feels both like an eternity since that day and only a matter of a few weeks.

It has been three months since we buried him next to our [paternal] grandparents.

People like to write essays about grief and all of the revelations and lessons they’ve learned and so much of it really reads like everything else on the internet: carefully curated and overly polished, full of algorithm pleasing buzz words.

As much as I scrutinize every last word I type, high-shine varnish has never been my thing.

I keep trying to come up with something to write about the first full year since my brother died. I want to claim I have something intelligent or insightful to say about grief, but I really don’t.

Grief is excruciating, exhausting, and ugly.

It’s not as all-consuming as it was in the early weeks. I’m learning to integrate it into the everyday, letting it coexist with everything else. The ball in the box has more room to move around these days.

It still hurts. I’m still angry. I don’t think I will ever fully accept why he’s gone.

I still think about him every single day.

I don’t think that will ever change.

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