Holding Grief

I used to think grief was something abstract. Something that lived in the background. Something you processed quietly and neatly, preferably off to the side of your life.

I was wrong. Grief is physical. It has weight. It has a temperature. It moves like the wind. You cannot see it, but you can feel when it hits you, and you can feel when it knocks the breath out of your chest.

I was at the height of something beautiful when grief found me. I had just finished film school. I had an agent. I booked a job. I was on set, doing the thing I had worked so hard for, standing in the middle of a life I had imagined for years. That same day, between takes and texts and adrenaline, I found out my dad had cancer.

There is no gentle way for a moment like that to land. One second you are building a future, and the next you are packing a bag to come home. And go home I did; I came back to the place that raised me, back to my parents, back to the people who had always been my safety net.

My dad fought hard. He was brave. He was stubborn in the way only strong men are. And when he passed, the world shifted. The kind of shift you feel in your bones. The kind that makes everything familiar suddenly look different.

And there it was. Grief. Hovering over me again. Yes, again. I was no stranger to it. It visited me at 13, when I lost my best friend. Again at 16, when I lost another friend. Again in my 20s when I lost my grandparents and more friends. But that was all outside of my home. There had never been grief inside my home, which was full of love. This was a different grief. The grief you see when you look in the mirror and the eyes looking back at you are no longer yours; they are those of the person who raised you.

Then there was my mom. My mom and I were inseparable, especially after my dad passed away. Best friends in the truest sense. She was my constant. My first phone call. My grounding force. When I lost my dad, she was the one who held me together, or so I thought. But then my mother’s best friend passed three months after my dad, and it seemed I was the one holding my mom together. And then an overconfident doctor took her from me.

She passed away during a routine stent surgery in her leg, one that fewer than 1 percent of people in the United States die from. Less than 1 percent. Make that make sense.

It does not. Still doesn’t.

That is the part of grief no one prepares you for: the math that does not add up. The statistics that mean nothing when you become the exception. The way the world keeps functioning as if something impossible did not just happen.

Now grief feels like something I carry in my hands. It is a ball made of puzzle pieces. Tiny fragments of memory, shock, love, anger, longing, and disbelief. Some days I spend hours fitting the pieces back together. Other days, it feels like it takes years. Sometimes I almost finish. Sometimes it feels whole again, solid and manageable.

And then something bumps me.

A smell.

A song.

A voice that sounds like theirs.

A quiet moment when I least expect it.

Or the wind just simply blows.

And the ball flies out of my hands, shattering open again. There it is, exposed for the world to see.

Grief.

It is not tidy. It is not linear. It does not disappear because enough time has passed. It simply changes shape. It teaches you how to hold it differently, even when your hands are tired.

Grief is natural. It will happen to everyone. Love guarantees it.

I was just unlucky enough for it to happen young, many times that were close together, and without warning.

But I am still here. Still rebuilding. Still believing in fresh starts. Still learning that grief does not mean the end of joy. It means love was present. It means something mattered enough, and it mattered deeply.

And if 2026 brings another beginning, I will meet it with these hands that know how to hold both hope and grief at the same time.