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I’ll never forget the night of August 9th in 2023. My mother had been upstairs at my house and came barreling down the steps and burst into my room.
She just kept screaming over and over that my nephew had just passed away. I remember dropping to my knees and it felt like the world stopped moving. My heart felt like a brick in my chest. She was in shock and I couldn’t believe what she was saying.
Lonnie was just 19 years old and the youngest of four children. He had just graduated from high school and had his whole future ahead of him. He had been a football star and was the bright light of our family. He was the kind of kid who lit up rooms with his infectious smile and charm.
I remember rocking him to sleep when he was just a few months old. I remember helping my sister with birthday parties when he was little. It was like every granular memory decided to flood my head in those first few seconds.
I went through initial shock and just kept hoping we’d get a call back that said the doctors were able to save his life. But that didn’t happen. Instead, I got a call from the hospital where I could hear my sister screaming in the background for someone to give her her baby back. Two years later and I still remember that call like it was yesterday.
Grief is strange.
It doesn’t come in waves like everyone says, it crashes, pulls you under, then spits you out when you least expect it. There’s no right way to process something like that. It’s a cardinal rule that’s never supposed to break. At first, I tried to keep moving, to keep doing “normal” things, as if momentum could shield me from the pain. But grief demands to be felt. It doesn’t care about your schedule, your responsibilities, or how much you wish you could just be okay again. It forces you to stop, to sit in the ache, and to let yourself feel every ounce of what you’ve lost. Processing it meant giving myself permission to cry, to be angry, to fall apart, and then to start piecing myself back together in whatever shape I could manage that day.
Unless you’ve been through it, no one tells you there are stages of grief you’re going to go through, and that they don’t follow an order, or make any sense. You think you’re doing better one day, and then something small, a song, a smell, a picture, shatters you all over again. One moment you’re laughing, the next you’re gutted. Grief doesn’t fade; it changes form. Some days it feels lighter, like a shadow that just lingers nearby. Other days, it’s heavy and suffocating, like it’s taken up residence in your chest. You learn how to carry it, not because you want to, but because you have to. You have to keep living because they can’t.
Lonnie passed from a tragic four wheeling accident so initially there was a lot of blame and anger, which was valid. One of the hardest stages of grief is navigating through the period of anger where you want to place blame on everyone and everything because it feels impossible to accept that something so unfair could just happen. I was angry at the world, at the doctors, at anyone who got to wake up and go about their normal day while ours had completely fallen apart. I was angry that life kept moving when his had stopped. That kind of anger burns hot, but underneath it is heartbreak. It’s love with nowhere to go. And slowly, over time, I learned that forgiving the world for continuing on, and forgiving myself for not being able to fix it, was part of the healing too.
Regret is normal.
The next stage is regret, the kind that creeps in late at night when the house is quiet and your mind starts replaying every missed call, every “I’ll text him tomorrow,” every time you were too busy living your own life to check in. It’s a brutal kind of guilt because you can’t go back and do it differently. You start thinking about all the conversations you could’ve had, all the moments you took for granted, all the times you assumed there’d be more time. Regret teaches you how fragile life really is, how we spend so much of it rushing through the days, not realizing how quickly those days turn into memories. It’s a hard truth to face, that sometimes, the last time you see someone, you don’t know it’s the last.
It’s like you’re watching your own life from the outside, moving through fog while the world around you keeps spinning too fast. That first morning is pure shock, you wake up hoping it was just a nightmare, but then reality hits again like a freight train. Then comes the anger. You’re angry at the world for daring to keep going, at people for heading to work like nothing happened, at the sun for rising when your world has gone dark. Eventually, the sadness takes over. It’s quieter, but heavier, the kind that sits in your chest and makes it hard to breathe. You just learn to keep living.
And then comes the hardest day of all: the funeral. Nothing can prepare you for standing there, surrounded by flowers and faces that blur together, realizing this is the moment you have to say your forever goodbye. That day feels endless and hollow, a blur of tears and disbelief. You walk away knowing life will never look or feel the same again.
Celebrating their Life.
The first year after is the hardest. Every holiday feels off, like the world is slightly tilted without them in it. There’s always an empty chair, a missing laugh, a silence where there used to be joy. You try to celebrate because you know they’d want you to, but guilt sneaks in anyway. You feel it when you laugh, when you smile, when you catch yourself enjoying a moment they’ll never get to see. And then their birthday comes, the first one you don’t get to call, text, or hug. You buy the cake anyway. You light the candle. You sing to the sky. You celebrate their first heavenly birthday because even though they’re gone, they’re still everywhere, in every memory, every story, every heartbeat that keeps going in their honor.
I wouldn’t wish for anyone to ever be inducted into this club, and yet this tragedy would strike twice for our family.
You know something bad has happened when your phone starts ringing off the hook at 7am from multiple family members on a Saturday morning. We were notified that my cousin’s son tragically passed away in a car wreck. He was so similar to Lonnie. Just graduated from high school recently, was a football star and had his whole life ahead of him. He was the second great-grandchild our Grammy lost, and that feeling alone is enough to break your heart in ways words can’t explain. She has over 20 grandchildren and over 30 great-grandchildren. Watching her go through that kind of pain again is unbearable.
But we knew exactly what my family was feeling because we’d already walked through that same kind of darkness. We knew what it meant to answer those impossible calls, to collapse to the floor in disbelief, to feel the world tilt off its axis. We knew how to show up, with silence, with hugs, with just being there, because no words could ever fix what had been broken. The only thing you can do in those moments is hold each other up, the way others once held you.
Begin the healing.
Grief teaches you that healing doesn’t mean forgetting, it means carrying them with you differently. You start finding ways to keep their memory alive, to talk about them often, to laugh about the stories that made them who they were. You celebrate their life by living yours fully, by showing up for the people you love, by saying “I love you” more, by taking the pictures, by being present. Because that’s what they would have wanted. They may be gone, but their light still flickers through everything we do.
If losing them taught me anything, it’s to stop taking life for granted. To let go of the grudges, the petty arguments, the things that don’t really matter when you zoom out. We only get one shot at this, one fragile, unpredictable life on this floating rock, and none of us know when our time will be up. So call the people you love. Tell them what they mean to you. Laugh louder. Show up more. Stop waiting for the “right time” to make things right, because sometimes there isn’t another chance. At the end of it all, the memories, the love, and the moments you shared are the only things that truly matter. Everything else fades.
And chase your dreams today, because tomorrow is not promised.
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