Grief lives in the quiet.

"There is no grief like the grief that does not speak." — Henry Wordsworth Longfellow

When we lost our friend, it was hard to process. He was always the one laughing, joking, the one who seemed always happy. Easily the funniest in our group, he carried an energy that filled every room. His absence did not make sense, and it took a while for the reality to truly sink in.

The questions started circling: “What could I have done more?”, “Why didn’t I see it coming?”

But for me, I never asked them, not once. Maybe because I have always known that suicide is something we will never truly understand. My grief was not about the why. It was about the silence left behind.

On September 10th, my friend sent me pictures of the beaches and places where we grew up. We spoke that day about how much I wanted to go back, how much I missed him, and how I missed our talks. That day we said, “soon.”

For me, the grief that stayed was the weight of that word, the someday that will never come. The ache of knowing I would never again hear him laugh or see him sit behind his drums. I carried this quiet hope that someday I would go back, that I would see him again, that we would keep our promise of catching up. And the hardest part was realizing that someday would never come.

I printed all the pictures he sent me that day and hung them in my hallway. He was crazy talented, and now those photos are a treasure, tiny windows back to the places we shared and the parts of him that remain.

It has been three years since that day, but I do not think I really sat with the question of how it felt until now... Only now do I begin to understand what I was grieving, not just his absence, but the pieces of my own story that would never be lived alongside his.

Sometimes grief lives in the quiet; it takes its time to reveal itself, and it has a way of reshaping us. I am still figuring out what that really means. I do not have it all understood, and maybe I never will. But I know it has slowed me down, made me notice the fragile, fleeting presence of the people I love, and taught me to hold on to the details, the pauses, the moments I might have otherwise rushed past.

September is Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, a reminder that while we may not have the power to stop every storm, we do have the power to hold each other closer in the calm between them.