The Knicks were clawing their way past the Celtics in Game 1 of an NBA Playoffs match so intense, my two young sons morphed into courtside commentators operating at decibel levels usually reserved for jet engines and Skittle-fueled birthday parties. We were shrieking with glee and high-fiving—me half-tracking the score, half-rummaging for my noise-canceling AirPods before their joy blew out my inner ear. Then, just after Jalen Brunson drove to the basket, a commercial cut in.
It was an AT&T ad portraying people suddenly inspired to dial up the ones they love from lush backyards, a boat on the Delta, and…a tightrope bridging a deep canyon. My stomach knotted up as it correctly sensed where this was going. At the end, three little words appeared, deceptively gentle, expertly lethal in their timing: Call your mom.
I’d love to. But she won’t answer. Eighteen years ago, my mom, Shelby, was killed in an accident on the New Jersey Turnpike. My grief is now the age of a legal adult. It can vote. It can enlist. It may not yet be able to rent a car, but it certainly has been driving one for a while, quietly gripping the wheel during moments in which I naively thought I was steering. Like many 18 year olds, my grief is composed and self-sufficient one moment, then reckless, loud, and needy the next. It is nuanced. It has opinions. It talks back.
I know full well that the passage of time doesn’t erase grief, but rather, stretches it. The sharp edges don’t vanish; they just space themselves out, lying in wait. That’s not a failure of healing. It’s just what love and loss look like when pulled across time.
My grief no longer flattens me on a daily basis. It’s less like a storm and more like humidity—part of the atmosphere I move through, affecting everything, even when I’m not fully aware. It’s embedded now, woven into my weltanschauung (a German word for “world view”); how I watch basketball with my sons; how I read a line in a commercial and suddenly forget where I am. My grief is quieter, yes. But make no mistake: It’s still capable of ambush, long after society has decided that I should have “moved on.”
Read More: Let’s Talk About Our Grief
This is normal. Neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor, who studies the grieving brain, has found that long after someone dies, our neural pathways continue to “search” for them, as if expecting someone to walk back through the door, or call, or text. This isn’t just a metaphor—it’s biology. Brain scans show grief activates the same regions involved in attachment and reward. We’re wired to seek out those we’ve lost, even when we consciously know they’re gone. It’s no wonder, then, that years—even decades—later, a scent, a commercial, or the shape of a stranger’s hand can deliver the blow all over again. Absence, as it turns out, is still a kind of presence. And the brain, like the heart, doesn’t always know the difference.
Grief isn’t linear—yet, at the very moment sustained support is most needed, the few resources that do exist are vanishing. In Texas, for instance, the 988 suicide and crisis hotline is grappling with a $7 million funding deficit, leading to thousands of abandoned calls each month as centers struggle to meet demand. Nationally, the outlook is just as grim: the Trump administration’s decision to abruptly cancel nearly $1 billion in Department of Education grants has jeopardized school-based mental health programs across the country, leaving many students without essential support. In rural states where mental health care is already scarce, schools that depended on these grants now face serious setbacks: In Nebraska, that means reduced access to trauma-informed care for Native American students; in parts of Texas with high youth suicide rates, it means fewer lifelines for kids in crisis. The list goes on—despite an August 2024 American Psychiatric Association poll showing that 84% of Americans believe school staff are essential in spotting early warning signs.
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is planning to cut approximately 83 thousand jobs, representing over 17% of its workforce. These reductions are expected to significantly impact mental health services, leading to longer wait times for therapy and counseling appointments—up to four months in some cases. I think about what it would have meant to sit in that raw, bewildering pain and trauma for more than a season without help—and how easily I might have gone under.
Mental health providers and organizations are doing important work. But even apart from recent budget cuts, there is a notable absence of national policies that reflect what loss actually looks like: expanded bereavement leave, sustained mental health funding, and public acknowledgment of collective trauma. Grassroots initiatives like the National COVID Memorial, for instance, have emerged to honor the more than 1.2 million Americans who died of COVID-19. Yet, there is no federally recognized national memorial, either as a day or a physical place. And while the nonprofit Evermore is leading a two-year program to understand people’s lived experience with bereavement in order to help guide future research, the U.S. still does not have a universal national bereavement leave policy that mandates paid time off for grieving employees.
Read More: Don’t Say You ‘Can’t Imagine’ the Grief of Those Who Have Lost Loved Ones. Ask Them to Tell You Their Stories
This lack of acknowledgment underscores a broader societal discomfort with sustained mourning. Ironically, when individuals who have experienced profound loss connect, there’s an immediate, unspoken understanding—a shared language of loss. If we fully embraced that truth, we’d have a gentler time moving through hard things. I know this from personal experience. Over the past eight years, I’ve personally matched nearly 3 thousand grievers across multiple countries in gift exchanges timed to Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Sibling’s Day, and the winter holidays—an effort to help people reclaim a sense of agency during some of the most tender dates on the calendar. We need more spaces for these connections, and to grant permission to honor and express our grief without the pressure to rush through. Grief is not a problem to be solved, but a journey to be supported, individually and collectively.
I’ve grown up alongside my grief. I’ve filled a toolbox’s worth of coping mechanisms. Most days, I describe myself as “living with loss” rather than “grieving.” But there are still moments—sudden, surgical—when it resurfaces with uncanny precision, cracking open what I was sure had been carefully, finally sealed. And when I’m pulled out of the reveries by my two kids yelling for me to catch the final seconds of a nail-biting game, I’m still learning to live with the version of grief on the sofa beside us—part child, part adult, unpredictable and unfinished, just like any teenager finding their way.
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