Today would have been my uncle’s birthday. He passed away in 2019, and yet the way time has moved since then feels strange and contradictory. In some moments, it feels like it happened just yesterday — the shock, the disbelief, the aching absence. In other moments, it feels like a lifetime has passed, like I’ve carried this grief through so many different versions of myself. Both are true, and both are exhausting in their own way.
For me, there are two days every year that hold a deep, unshakable sadness: the day he died in April, and August 11, the day he was born. I feel the weight of them not only when the days arrive, but in the days leading up to them. It’s like an approaching storm you can sense before the clouds even appear. My mood dips, my chest feels heavier, and my mind revisits old memories without asking my permission. I find myself counting the days in reverse, knowing when those anniversaries will come.
People often say that “time heals all wounds,” but I’ve learned that it’s not always that simple. Time can soften pain for some, but for others, it just teaches us how to live alongside it. Grief has its own clock, and it doesn’t always move in the same direction as the calendar. When my uncle died, it was the first major loss I had experienced. But it was not the last. What followed was a cascade of other losses — people, relationships, stability. I think part of why my grief still feels so raw is because I never truly had the space to heal from the first blow before the next ones arrived. That’s the nature of compound grief: it piles on, overlapping and intertwining until the lines between one loss and another blur. It’s not just sadness; it can be deeply traumatic.
By the time the pandemic began in March 2020, I was already in a fragile headspace from those earlier losses. I had been trying to find my footing again, but then suddenly I was faced with a whole new layer of fear — not just for myself, but for everyone I cared about. The safety of my friends, my family, my community was constantly on my mind, and it came so soon after having to say goodbye to people I loved. During those pandemic years, I lost even more: more people I cared for, beloved pets, and even a job I had wanted to work in. It felt like the world was taking pieces from me faster than I could grieve for the ones already gone.
And it wasn’t just the virus and the losses. There was the summer of 2020, filled with social unrest and protests that shook the nation. The presidential election and the turbulent aftermath in 2021 added another layer of collective stress. Regardless of where anyone stood politically, those years were charged and exhausting for everyone. The sense of uncertainty was constant, and for someone already carrying personal grief, the weight of it all was immense.
Then there were the disasters that didn’t make grief wait its turn — the remnants of Hurricane Ida bringing flooding and chaos, wildfires turning skies orange, and other extreme weather events that seemed to come one after another. It felt like every time I began to breathe again, something else would happen. The anxiety wasn’t just in my mind — it was in the air, the water, and the headlines.
Eventually, all of it caught up with me. I was drained. Numb. Going through the motions of a life that felt stuck in an endless loop — not moving forward, just circling through the same days over and over. It was like living in a kind of personal purgatory, knowing something was off but not having the energy to fix it. In 2024, I finally started therapy. I went for a few months, stopped for a while, and then began again in 2025 with a different therapist. This time, something clicked. The sessions have been helping me untangle the knots, to recognize patterns I didn’t see before, and to slowly find my way toward feeling more present in my own life.
And yet, I don’t want to leave this reflection in a place of hopelessness. Even though I still carry this pain, I’ve learned that grief can exist alongside joy, love, and meaning. Healing doesn’t always look like “moving on” — sometimes it’s about carrying someone with you in a way that shapes who you are. I still feel my uncle in the music we both loved, in the quiet moments when I think about what he’d say to me now, in the small things that would have made him laugh. These connections remind me that while death changes the shape of a relationship, it doesn’t erase it.
So today, I honor his life as much as I acknowledge my grief. I let myself feel the sadness, but I also let myself feel the gratitude for having known him at all. Time may not heal all wounds, but it can teach us that even with the scars, love remains.
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