Grief Without a Finish Line

Seven years feels both impossibly small and unbearably large. Today the calendar says it’s been seven years, but my chest keeps insisting it’s still the day I learned my world would be different forever. Every year I think I’m farther along than I was the year before. I can breathe easier, I can love without fear, I can hold myself together for the most part and yet this year the missing just feels… heavier. This whole month feels heavier. I couldn’t function after he died, so I built a whole mysterious town in my mind where he lives, and every street has his name on it. I’m not sure I even believe it, but imagining him somewhere makes the not-here almost bearable. I walk those streets so often now I can almost hear his footstep beside mine, and then the silence punches me again… he’s never coming back. That truth sits like stone, and some days I am exhausted from trying to make peace with it.

It’s the little betrayals that break me open. There are moments when my body forgets the timeline and reaches for a voice that I know will never answer back, and the forgetting itself becomes its own kind of grief. Football season comes roaring in and my hands reach for the phone before my brain remembers he’s not going to pick up. I catch myself waiting to argue about a play I don’t even understand, because arguing with him about football was the only way I could get him heated up and as a big sister, that was funny to me.

I find myself mid-laugh at something Blue does and stop, because her laugh folds into his and for a second the kitchen holds him… then the room remembers the truth and the air inside gets so heavy it’s unbearable. She makes that same ridiculous straight face he mad when I’m zoned out and then giggles to herself, and I forget who I’m supposed to be angry at: him, the world, the timeline, or the fact that life keeps making echoes of him that hurt so beautifully. I laugh thinking about him screaming beside me in the stands while my oldest dances. I know he would have been both mortified by her uniform and choreography and still so wildly proud. He would hate, absolutely hate, that she’s entering that tangled teenage season that includes boys and braces and everything that makes protective uncles hold their breath and he’d still be the first to make a terrible joke to get her to smile when a boy breaks her heart. Seeing him in the kids is a blessing that cuts. My son trailing behind his big sister, wanting into her whole universe and willing to create fake scenarios about people who hurt her, that’s Chris. The way my toddler already plants his stubborn little feet and refuses a compromise unless it’s on his terms, Chris again. I have always seen him there, in these small human replays, but this year those reflections feel like fresh edges against an old wound.

Last week I asked my therapist when the pain was supposed to stop, when the soul-deep hollowness would finally soften into something that no longer caught me by surprise and took my breath away. Just give me a date when the emptiness inside me stops sucking everything inside it like a black hole. She gave that quiet, weary little sigh I’ve come to trust and said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if it did, sweet girl?” The way she said it wasn’t cruel. It was the kind of answer that folds tenderness and reality into one small exhale. It landed in me like a truth I already half-knew but was still trying to bargain away: there is no tidy finish line where the missing gets checked off and life resumes exactly as it would have. Some days, the work is practical: learning how to celebrate something and not reach for his voice. Answering the phone and remembering it won’t be him on the other end. Other days it’s spiritual, ridiculous, and tender… building altars of ordinary things, noticing how his laugh emerges out of my child’s giggle, how his stubbornness hides in a small foot-stamp. The change isn’t a lessening so much as a re-patterning, like a house being rewired. The electricity is different now… sometimes the lights flicker in unexpected places. But they’re still on.

Even knowing that, knowing grief is an art of rearrangement and not erasure, my heart keeps writing a map with a finish line. I keep wanting a date on the calendar I can circle and know that’s what I’m working towards. I want an ending worthy of a storybook… a moment when the hurt is declared finished and I can step into the sun without glancing over my shoulder for him to come around the corner. She tells me that wanting a finish line isn’t a weakness, it’s a human plea for rest. It’s the part of me that remembers what it felt like to be whole in a very particular, ordinary way, before the rupture changed the geography of my life. I am learning how to keep him present without pretending the world is the way it was. I still hover over his number when something important happens. I still expect a text that will never come. And maybe that’s the long work: rearranging my life so that the parts of him that live in us can keep teaching us how to be human… loud and soft, stubborn and silly, endlessly present even when he isn’t.

There’s a secret fear braided into that work, one I don’t say out loud as often and I likely should. The idea that if the hurt ever softens into something I can carry more easily, maybe I’ll lose him in the same breath. What if the day comes when the phone stops being the sharp thing I catch my breath at, and the ache that wakes me at night stops visiting? What if that quiet means his edges have smoothed so much that I can no longer find him peeking from the corners of ordinary moments? Part of me wants relief, but another part clutches the pain like proof that he was here. A stubborn, painful talisman that says that he existed. He mattered. Letting the ache change feels, at times, like it is risking erasure.

I am terrified of what tenderness without pain might actually mean. Will the memory become just a warm photograph instead of the living, complicated person who argued about nothing and made the worst jokes and loved wildly?There’s also the thin, terrible worry that if the sorrow softens, the permission to keep him close, to speak his name without apology, to let my day be stitched to him, will feel unearned… as if grief is the only credential I have to hold him in the center of my life.

So I find myself walking a strange, tender line of wanting relief, fearing loss, and learning to allow both truths to exist at the same time. I am practicing trusting that memory and love don’t need the sharpness of pain to stay true. Loving him without the same kind of ache won’t be forgetting him completely. It will be rearranging how I keep him, moving his seat at the table from the burned-out place of loss to a softer, steadier chair that still faces the room. It will mean learning new rituals, new phrases, new ways to notice him… not because the hurt demanded it, but because love still does. And if I’m honest, that terrifies me and comforts me in the same breath. I guess it’s okay to be afraid, it means I still care, right?

I miss his laugh, his sarcasm, the way he loved, loudly and without apology. I miss having someone who could translate me, knew what I was thinking and how I felt instinctively. Seven years and my love for him is not any smaller… it is older, more tender, and somehow more honest about how much it aches. Seven years without my baby brother. I will love him through every single one still to come. I’ll carry him forever… not just in the hurt, but in the laughter I can’t hold back. In the way I love others louder because he loved me that way, in the stubborn streaks that remind me not to fold too easily. He was the kind of man who would give the shirt off his back without hesitation. Love came so naturally to him, like breathing. If someone needed him, he’d dropped everything, and people adored him for it. I’ve always been different… I’m more closed in, more careful with the edges of myself, always afraid of imposing. I love helping people, but I do it with so much hesitation, with the quiet fear of being too much. He never carried that fear. He just lived wide open, and sometimes I think the world broke him for it, but it’s also what made him unforgettable. He lived the way I wish I could be brave enough to. 

So I keep him alive the only way I know how… by learning from the pieces of him that remain in me. By letting his generosity push against my hesitation, by letting his openness remind me to risk closeness. Still, I can’t shake the fear that one day the map will blur, that the lines will fade, that I’ll wake up and realize I’ve carried him so far inside me that I can no longer feel where he begins and I end. Maybe that’s what terrifies me most, not that grief never ends, but that one day it will… and I won’t know how to hold him anymore.