Grief: It's fucking weird.

& "totally natural" & COMPLETELY surreal. Cool.

My brain is full.

It’s normally full. I am a textbook anxious ruminator who is growing out of people-pleasing and into healthy emotional regulation—so there’s a lot to think about. My therapist says I’m kicking ass. I’ll take it.

And I can feel my brain expanding—the fullness becoming more bearable as understanding makes more space for it. Suddenly, the glass is half full (so to speak).

Now, I can easily say that this much-larger glass is VERY full.

For those who don’t know: My uncle recently passed away. My closest uncle. Essentially my dad. (TL;DR My real dad is not an ideal father candidate.) He was diagnosed with colon cancer in mid-November and was gone by March.

And I feel like I’m living in an alternate reality.

I know what you’re going to say. You send condolences. He’s no longer suffering. That I “get it” now. I’m part of a club into which nearly everyone gets initiated. And it happens to everyone at some point—we will all leave this world when it’s our time, and our energy will move somewhere…else. (Wherever that place is, or isn’t, for you.)

And I appreciate it, I really do. But it’s overwhelming. And it gets in the way of all my near-perfect distractions.

To be clear: I don’t want to forget a thing. I was so scared to miss anything over the last few months that I traveled down to VA as much as possible to be with him and my family. (Shoutout to my mom, Becca & Alessandra for doing the extremely harrowing work of day-to-day care in the hospital and at home.) I ultimately wanted to stay and help when things got really bad, but my mom—the best person in the world—offered wise counsel: “We love having you here, but you have to think about your future.” So I went back up to New York and into the office.

Better that they were running the show anyway; I’m not very domestically inclined.

But I am a compartmentalizer by nature. I’d come home, relieved for the distraction, and then right before bed, the guilt would nudge me.

No, not guilt. Grief.

“It’s terminal,” Grief reminded me, a Greek chorus in my head. “You will regret forgetting.” And in that moment, laying in bed, I let memories flood in.

Thanksgiving: “I also have liver cancer.”

Christmas: Chemo. He sits in a chair next to the kitchen island, grinning as we all catch up. It did not seem simple to grin.

January: “G, you need to come down here. It’s everywhere.”

February: “I love having you here.”

“Love you.”

“Love you.”

“Love you.”

And now he is gone. A beautiful, moving naval veteran’s funeral. We decided he would’ve laughed at all the makeup they put on him for the viewing. (Really, it was too much.) I am now left wondering what comes next.

Here’s where I’ve landed:

It’s easy to think that “nothing matters.” That’s not entirely true. MOST things don’t fucking matter (i.e. what I do for work, other people’s opinions of me, my “social status” (ew), etc). What DOES matter is the one thing that seems to be left at the end:

My relationships. Genuine connection with my heart WIDE open. Love.

And how do I, for lack of a better word, achieve that? Well. There is no sense in being anything other than ME, turned all the way up—which can be very, incredibly, extremely difficult—and to share that Me with every single person I can. And, when I do that, the RIGHT people show up. (What a concept.) Being Me saves me. It brings me the relationships that allow me to fill that deeply connective purpose. It brings me people who are kind & honest & empathetic—people who allow me to be seen.

And why are we here if not to take the string attached to each of us and pull them a little closer together?

As Uncle Frankie said nearly every moment since November: Love you.

What a deeply important reminder that is.

-GM