For My Uncle, and the Grief He Left Behind

There’s no easy way to talk about grief.

Believe me, in the last two weeks, I’ve tried.

My uncle passed away after a long battle with a rare disease called Aphasia on October 22nd. There’s no delicate way to say that, so I figured it was as good a way to start as any article centered around losing someone you love. He was my mom’s uncle, actually, but calling him great-uncle makes him sound like this old, distant figure in my life, and that’s not who he was.

He was, firstly, full of life. He had the loudest laugh I have ever heard; it echoed through rooms and boomed across the dinner table, usually while he was telling a very spirited story about someone else at the table. 

My family is from New York, though they moved to Arizona when my mom was eight. They’re also Jewish, and live up to the clichés of the loud East Coast Jews in the best way possible. They all talk over one another constantly and sound like they’re arguing half the time, but that’s just how they speak. It’s why I consider myself pretty good at public speaking now, if I’m being honest. I can also join three different conversations at once, which is a party trick of sorts.

everyone’s favorite, especially mine: my uncle steve

I love my family, and Steve, my amazing uncle, was everyone’s favorite. He was the fun uncle to my mom and her brother, and though he was my grandpa’s in-law, they were brothers in every sense of the word. On their Facebook pages, their birthday messages to one another often echo this sentiment. (I did, admittedly, spend a bit of time looking over my uncle’s Facebook page after he passed. I missed him. I still do, of course.)

All this is to say that when I got the news that Steve was gone, I was entirely unprepared for how to come to terms with it. I hadn’t seen him in about a year, which certainly didn’t help, and I’d never dealt with a loss like this before. I know I’m lucky to be saying that, but it made it that much harder to process his death. I was so sad and confused, and I couldn’t make it to his funeral that weekend, so instead I sat in my room and looked through the few pictures I have of us, along with a full album of ones spanning Steve’s whole life. 

It’s odd, looking at pictures of someone who’s gone and trying to make sense of them as you know them in your head, and who they are in said pictures. My favorite one I came across is of my uncle and his wife, Heather, probably not long after they were married. My uncle, as my mom puts it, “always loved on her”, which just means he was a big hugger. In the picture, he has both of his arms wrapped around her, like he’s trying to be as close as humanly possible to her without entirely smothering her. It’s one of the many photos I’ve found that shows his huge heart, his iconic mustache (I mean, come on! It’s amazing, right?), and how effortlessly endearing he always was. 

It’s not easy to talk about him knowing that I have few concrete memories of him before he got sick. It’s hard to admit that I’ve talked about him more in the last two weeks than in the two years leading up to his death. But I guess that’s one of the things I’ve learned in the midst of my grief — it’s never going to feel right or easy. I am by no means in a place to give advice to others who have experienced something like this, but I think it’s worth noting that grief is nothing like what I expected it to be (not that I spent much time wondering how it would feel). But the five stages are something I think almost everyone knows about, and they’re not quite as linear or singular as I imagined them to be. 

experiencing different stages of grief

I’ve felt three stages at once, or teetered between two, unsure of what to feel first. Is it sadness, or anger? Have I accepted it, or do I just think that because I’ve been too busy doing schoolwork to remember how sad I am? Is it considered bargaining when I wonder how I’ll feel a year from now, knowing I didn’t go to the funeral? When does it get better?

The only answer I really have is to the last one, and unfortunately, it’s about as vague as answers come: no one knows. It’s different for everyone. I can dress up for Halloweekend and enjoy a night with my friends, and then I can wake up the next morning and see a text from my mom about her flight home from Arizona (we live in NorCal) and feel the loss all over again. I can think about when I will visit next, and what it’ll feel like to know there is no Steve and Heather’s house anymore. 

For now, though, I do my best to take it one day at a time. I let myself feel whatever I need to. I tell my friends about what I’m feeling, because keeping it inside is the worst thing I could do (that much I know, at least). I’m learning to live with the grief, as though it’s a living organism with a mind of its own. Some days, the two of us get along, and I laugh with my mom about Steve’s awful drink choice (a martini where you swirl the vermouth around and then toss it out, so you’re just left with gin and a touch of lemon. We are not fans). Other times, though, I fall victim to grief’s wave, which douses me in moments that I can’t prepare for (checking out an older customer talking about their grandchildren at work, or passing by the Hanukkah display). It just depends on the day, or even the hour. It feels like playing a game without knowing you’re playing at all, until you’re somehow losing.

remembering my loved one

I try to embrace the good, and sit with the not so good. It’s all part of remembering Steve, who lived all 79 of his years as an amazing son, brother, husband, father, uncle, grandpa, friend, and even business partner. He was as loved as a person can be. I hope that anyone reading this who’s gone through grief knows that there is never and will never be a “right way” to do it, so whatever you’ve done (or are doing) is the right way.

All you can do is tell stories and laugh or cry when you need to. That’s all you really can do.

As Vision asks in Marvel’s Wandavision, “What is grief, if not love persevering?”

The answer, in my opinion, is that they are the same.

Because grief is just proof that love came first, and that’s the beauty of it, isn’t it?

• mental health