Death

PART 1 — DEATH

Hey, thanks for being here. If you've already read "A Life's Journey of Loss, Pain, and Resilience," you know exactly where this starts. If you haven't, don't worry, you'll catch up fast.

I was ten years old the first-time death called me on the phone. Not a figure of speech I mean that literally. I was talking to my dad, and I heard a sound I still can't fully explain. Then nothing. Then my aunt's voice tearing apart as she said the four words, I had no room in my head for yet: your father is dead.

At ten, "dead" wasn't a word that meant anything to me yet. What I understood was strangers filling up our house. My mother going quiet in a way I'd never seen before. Being sent outside to play because none of the grown-ups knew what to do with us kids while they fell apart.

That was 1978. It would not be the last time.

In the years after that, loss became something I got to know a lot better than I ever wanted to. An uncle who taught me to love baseball and music, taken by violence a few years later. An aunt who called me "Ace" and made the whole world feel safe at her kitchen table. A grandmother who raised me like I was her own. Two sisters I loved and, in different ways, took care of with my own hands. A grandfather who was the backbone of everything our family stood on. Another grandmother who was the rock of my mom’s family. And lastly, my mother where I do really have the words to explain how her death nearly broke me in an unimaginable way. Each one of them took something with them when they went. And strange as it sounds, each one also left something behind.

Here's the one thing I want you to sit with if you take nothing else from this episode: the hurt doesn't just go away, and time doesn't heal it the way people love to promise you it will. What changes isn't the wound. What changes is you. You get stronger around it. You learn to carry it instead of letting it flatten you.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you I've got this figured out. I still feel ten years old the second I walk through the gates of my father's grave. I still hear that sound sometimes. But somewhere along the way I learned that grief and resilience aren't opposites. They live in the same house. They always have.

In the parts ahead, I'm going to walk you through more of what loss taught me some of it about the people I lost, and a lot more about who I had to become in order to survive losing them. If anything in this hit close to something you're carrying yourself, I hope it helps to know you're not carrying it wrong.

You're just carrying it. That's the whole job, some days.

Thanks for listening. This is Part One: Death. There's more where this came from.