Layers of loss

Loss entered my life early, shifting the air around me before I had words for what was happening.

In second grade, my great-grandmother died. It was the first time I saw adults cry in that particular way—quiet, resigned, as if their grief was older than their words. I didn’t know then that it was only the beginning, the start of a rotation of painful goodbyes I would learn too early and too often.

By fourth grade, the losses came so close together they blurred. My uncle died the day after turning thirty-six. Two months later his father—my Granddaddy—died. And the day before that, my great-uncle. I was nine years old, standing between adults whose hearts were breaking faster than they could catch their breath.

I watched my Granny grieve her son, her brother, and her husband within two months—two of them within twenty-four hours. We attended back-to-back funerals, leaving the cemetery only to return to the funeral home again. No child should learn grief in such rapid succession, but I did. It taught me early that life can take what you love before you’re ready—and that the world doesn’t pause just because your heart does.

Years later, losing my mom shook me in a way I still struggle to explain. I was twenty-four—not a child, but not yet the version of myself who could fully understand her, either. I didn’t think parents were permanent; I wasn’t naïve about loss. But I was still young enough to have so many unanswered questions about my childhood, my identity, our family history. I was just beginning to see her through an adult lens—not only as “Mom,” but as a woman with her own past, her own dreams, and her own disappointments. That shift had barely begun when it was suddenly cut short.

I held her hand as she died. It’s a moment I both cherish and revisit carefully because it reminds me how final love can feel when it has nowhere left to go.

She died before I learned the right questions to ask. Her death didn’t just break my heart; it rerouted the way I understood grief. It became a process, not an event—a long, uneven journey of figuring out who you are without the person who helped shape your beginning.

My grandfather died in 2011. I wasn’t with him in his final days, and that sadness stayed with me, but my visit two weeks before he passed became an unexpected gift—a gentle, quiet end note I still hold onto.

What stayed with me even more was watching my grandma grieve him. It wasn’t the same kind of grief I saw in my dad after my mom died more than a decade earlier. His grief was raw, immediate, cracked open. Hers was quieter, steadier, but weighted by the sheer length of their life together.

She and my grandpa had been best friends for nearly seventy years—truly inseparable. They rarely spent time apart, and somewhere along the way they had grown into one complex, intertwined unit. When he died, she didn’t just lose a husband; she lost the other half of the rhythm that had shaped nearly her entire life—the kind of grief that comes from losing the person who has been beside you for longer than you’ve been alone.

Watching that kind of loss teaches you something profound about devotion—and about the cost of surviving the person you can’t imagine living without.

My grandma lived six years without her soulmate and died in 2017, just two weeks before I packed up my VW Golf and moved to Atlanta. She gave me her blessing to move south: “You’ll be happy there.” Somehow, she knew.

In 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, my dad died. We had talked the night before. He spoke about The Shawshank Redemption, about my mom and his mom, and how much he missed them both. He told me he knew I was happy, and that gave him peace. The next morning, he called me again, and I missed the call. When I called back, he didn’t answer. I’m still thankful for that last conversation the night before.

Grief didn’t stop there. It shifted shapes.

I’ve also lost family in quieter, less visible ways. As I grew into myself without parental influence shaping who I was supposed to be, I started to see the places where we no longer aligned—maybe never had. There were differences in values, in worldview, in how we treated one another, in what we believed love and loyalty should look like. And so I slowly slipped away—not in anger, not in rebellion, but in quiet self-preservation. It was its own kind of grief, losing people who were still alive but no longer able to meet me where I was learning to live honestly.

I’ve lost beloved pets, too—each one taking a deeply personal piece of me. Every goodbye crushed my heart, but the sadness didn’t linger in the same way because I understood something about them that I couldn’t apply anywhere else: their lives are designed to be short. That’s the contract. And still, they love us with their whole being. I loved them fully for as long as I could. The grief was sharp but cleaner—heartbreak without betrayal. I still think of them often; their presence and their loss mattered. I carry them with me—literally—with tattoos that mark their place in my life and remind me of the love they gave so freely.

Losing friends through death is confusing. It interrupts the timeline you think you’re all walking through together.

Mike was only seventeen when he died in a car accident—a loss so sudden and senseless it rearranged my understanding of hope, of dreams. Years later, Gabe died at thirty-nine, taken by cancer long before anyone was ready. And then Chris, another friend from grad school, died of cancer just weeks after Gabe. Their deaths broke the unspoken promise of adulthood—that we would have more time.

When friends leave your life because you change or they change, it hits different. It’s a loss that often comes with guilt—the wondering if you could have tried harder, reached out sooner, softened your edges a little more. Should you have given an apology, or asked for one from them? It feels more sensitive, even a little shameful, to grieve friendships that ended by choice or drift. But that doesn’t make the ache any smaller.

Just as when friendships end, there are other losses that don’t have funerals. My marriage ended in 2018 when the man I loved didn’t follow me to Atlanta as we’d planned. Not long after, I eased into a six-and-a-half-year relationship with a woman who became my partner, my best friend, and my family—three roles she held at once, and three roles I lost all in the same moment when we broke up. Each role carries its own weight and pain. It will take me three times as long to heal.

Over time, loss began to show up everywhere—in my work, my purpose, my sense of self. I’ve lost jobs that felt like purpose. I’ve lost colleagues who felt like anchors. I’ve lost opportunities to feel joy, lightness, and belonging. I’ve lost the sense of safety I had been trying to build since childhood. I’ve lost the comfort of feeling loved and needed. I’ve lost versions of myself I am still trying to reach.

And maybe the hardest truth is this: I crave connection, yet often feel disconnected from almost everyone. Grief does that. It changes the air around you. It blurs your sense of time. It makes you feel like you’re living a split-second behind everyone else, watching the world move in ways you can’t quite join.

I am grieving loss in all its forms—death, endings, ruptures, vanished futures, the quiet dissolving of identities, the bonds that break without warning. But writing about it gives shape to the shifts inside me. It reminds me I’m still here, still trying, still piecing myself back together in ways that make sense of the life I’ve lived and the love I’ve lost.