Friday, Jan. 12, 2024 | 2 a.m.
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Reid died late last June, the day after his 27th birthday. He’d spent the past two years battling a rare form of cancer. But his passing occurred without warning, and it left me reeling.
He was here, and then he wasn’t.
Reid was my cousin, but I loved him like a sibling. He was my big brother in every way that mattered, and I learned so much about the world by watching him walk through it first. Growing up, I wanted to be just like him. I still do.
What I’ve learned in the past six months is that there are no five stages of grief. There is just grief — complex, ever-changing and profound. Most days it doesn’t quite feel real, because I don’t think it’s had enough time to sink in. I have one of those page-a-day calendars in my kitchen with cartoons from The New Yorker. I haven’t torn a page off since June 28, because it feels like time stopped that day, and I’ve just been existing in some liminal space ever since.
But I’ve also noticed that, collectively, we do a poor job of acknowledging grief. The well of grace and mercy for the grieving dries up long before it should. We do not give people the time or space they need to grieve openly and fully — we view it as a temporary affliction rather than something they will carry for the rest of their lives. After a certain amount of time, our mourning is expected to be private; speaking about it almost becomes taboo. But that makes it so incredibly lonely.
“What grief is and what it can include has not been well normalized in our society,” Justin Yopp, a clinical psychologist and associate professor of psychiatry at UNC-Chapel Hill, told me. Yopp works with patients and families like mine affected by cancer.
“As universal as it is, we’re not really prepared for it, and we don’t really talk about it enough,” Yopp said. “What’s out there about grief is sometimes either misleading, sometimes wrong and in some occasions even harmful.”
It may seem obvious, but it bears repeating: There is no right or wrong way to grieve, and everyone does it differently. Contrary to what we have been led to believe, grief is not linear, Yopp said.
To an outsider, it might look like my life is back to “normal.” I’m back at work, back in my apartment, doing many of the same things I did before. I still find ways to laugh and have fun. But that doesn’t mean I’m not still grieving. I’m just trying to make it through.
And if there’s one thing I know, it’s that Reid would want me to keep living. To be happy. “Get up!” he’d say. “Life is too damn short.” Over the past two years, I watched Reid undergo hospital stays, stem cell transplants, inpatient chemo, surgery, radiation and clinical trials. But he never stopped loving the life he fought so hard to live. The least I can do is channel some of his strength.
I don’t have much experience with death, so this kind of loss is wholly new to me. Only now do I understand how it feels to lose someone, and I’m not quite sure how to navigate it. It’s quite an unbearable thing, realizing your world is now missing someone who has always been a part of it. Not only do I mourn his presence in my life, I mourn the decades of life he’ll never get to live. “Loss” isn’t even the right word for it — this feels more like a theft.
“Grief sucks. Grief is miserable, and there is no timetable for it,” Yopp said. “And the more that we can just acknowledge and accept where we are and not try to shoehorn grief into some contrived belief of how we ‘should be’ doing, the better off we’ll be.”
I will miss Reid for the rest of my life. Years from now, I will still be looking back on old videos just to hear the sound of his laugh, or hearing his voice in my head when I’m navigating a difficult situation. I don’t think I will ever be OK with losing him. But I’m beginning to realize that, despite it all, I will be OK.
Paige Masten is a columnist for The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer.
