July 7, 2025

Silence. Quiet. Peaceful, terrible.

Tomorrow will be the first day without any guests. All have gone home, and my father, my brother, and I will experience our first bouts of alone time. It’s necessary, it’s healing, and it will likely be painful.

Torrents of grief, sacred and terrible, assuage we mourners. I’ve loved and appreciated the depth and beauty of sadness, but I still hate enduring it at this level of intensity. Sorrow opens one’s eyes to a new world and demands a new perspective from the sufferer. This new perspective can make one bitter or it can make him or her more compassionate, but it either way the perspective shift prompts a response.

Grief is traumatic. It assaults the mind and the nervous system. It manifests itself in sadness and anxiety. It steals sleep from some and it keeps others in bed for days. It produces shaky hands and sore eyes. It creates fear and mistrust. It eliminates filters and threatens boundaries that otherwise would protect its victims.

We aren’t strong, we mourners, we are incredibly weak. We are at our most vulnerable and most sensitive. We are raw. We hurt, often more than we ever deemed imaginable or bearable. Yet, we bear it.

Some watch mourners with awe and amazement — unsure how we could function. Some are offended if a mourner is snappy or not as “bubbly” as normal. Some prefer to look away, noting how painful it is to even think about what a mourner endures.

Grief manifests differently in every individual because of the uniqueness of every single relationship; while that makes each person’s experience vastly personal, a wondrous communal aspect exists when we mourn the same individual.

It’s private, and it’s not. It’s personal, and it’s shared.

Mourning callously brings out both the best and the worst in people, because we join together in our grief but can quickly isolate from offenses and hurts. We are vulnerable, we are tired, and we are boundlessly sad.

When we love each other and show up for one another and extend continuous grace — that is when we mourn well.

We mourn because we lost someone so incredibly precious, and we cannot stop loving them. Love transcends time, space, and even death. Love well.

Above all, love each other deeply for love covers a multitude of sins

I Peter 4:8

July 7, 2026

Mourning together softens the harshness of grief, but grief becomes even sharper when blame shifts grief’s focus.

Shared grief unites and upholds, it’s terrible but it’s together.

I had high hopes for our community at that time, but I suppose they were unrealistic expectations. Some people do wicked things because they’re in pain. To an extent, we all lash out in pain at one time or another.

When she first died, we mourned with thousands, but within a few weeks we were strategically cut off from many because of a few people’s commitment to weaponizing their pain.

We mourn more isolated now: we don’t mourn alone, but we really don’t mourn together either.

Mom wouldn’t have wanted that… or maybe she would have. Maybe that’s exactly what she wanted.

Maybe she didn’t care what happened to us or maybe she wanted the worst to happen to us, too.

Maybe it wasn’t about us at all. Maybe it was simply her brain dying, destructing with every breath she used to take, but it wasn’t an incurable malady. It was simply a neglected disease, hidden, shamed, and stigmatized.

That’s the scary thing about mental illness — it lies. It tells its victims that they don’t need to seek help. It tells its victims that others are the problem. It whispers to its victims that people don’t love them, don’t want them, don’t see them. Mental illness makes the sufferer think that he or she is sane, and that everyone else is the problem.

Mental health is a commitment to reality no matter the cost.

People can get caught up in delusions of terrible grandeur, thinking that the world is against them and that hopelessness will win. This is a clear sign that one is mental unhealthy, because while one breathes there is life and there is choice. Choice destroys hopelessness, and can bring change and renewed life.