The Grief and the Gap

My recent thoughts about grief and loss and death and what to say.

9 August 2025

I recently read Lifeform by Jenny Slate. The chapter "The Swan" provided one of the most beautiful illustrations of grief and loss I've probably ever read. Here's my favorite excerpt from that chapter:

"It seemed cruel to me that we patiently live through periods of anguish and shock when we lose our family members, and we keep facing it, believing that activity and time will settle it all down for us. We make a deal with fate: I'll keep this flame that signifies the one you took. I will let it scorch me in my heart if you let it die down naturally, and eventually there will just be a scar on my heart, and I will always know what I have lost. But by then, I will feel only the emptiness, not the terrible scald. I will let the fire of the loss run its course. This is the debt I will pay so that I can have a more bearable sadness.

If you were looking at us from somewhere else, looking at the humans, you would notice that there is no way for us to have our loves without breathtaking pain, not because we love brutally but because we lose each other at different times. We don't get to end together as one."

I'm nondiscriminatory about the things I write here, the only criteria being that I've thought about it for long enough that I feel the urge to put it into words. To box it up, to package it nicely in a digestible, contained form. Recently I've been thinking a lot more about more difficult topics, namely grief and loss and loneliness. So today I am writing from a place of softness and rawness and there's not much more to say about that. If I were speaking this, it would be delivered in the same gentle tone that moms say out-loud prayers in.

Through my grieving process, I found myself lingering on anger for a long time. I was angry at all the typical things like God and the continuous rotation of the Earth. I was angry my corporate PTO Bereavement ended, as if the world was saying: "grieving due EOW." I was angry at those around me who occasionally forgot what happened and misspoke. I was angry at those who tiptoed around me like I was a fragile, small mouse squished under a huge elephant in the room. I was angry at those who didn't know the elephant existed. I was most angry at those who had seen and met and discussed and apologized for the elephant and then promptly forgot it existed, because I could not forget it existed, because I was being crushed under it every day. For a very long time, I had very little patience.

My anger eventually dissipated into some form of frustrated understanding. I knew it didn't make logical sense to expect my friends to hold my loss in the forefront of their minds at all times like I did. I knew there would be an occasional slip-up and I knew that the cause was not malice nor apathy. I knew they did not think of him as often as I did, of course. My life was not the center of their thoughts, just as theirs wasn't at the center of mine. Many of them were grappling with their own hardships. That's just how it is.

Outside of my family, the next person closest to me, my best friends, probably thought about him only a small fraction as often as I did. Although I understood how natural and innocent it was, the gap in how much I thought about him and how much the next closest person to me thought of him was really painful to come to terms with. I started thinking constantly of this Gap, even coining the name. "The Gap felt wide today" I would write in my journal. I visualized it like the Grand Canyon. I was standing on the South Rim and my best friends, who I knew loved and cared for me more than I deserved, still felt so far away. They were standing on the North Rim. My friendships felt like when you're young and you learn that the moon is actually very close to the earth compared to the sun. But then again, you realize, the moon is still very very far away.

As mortal beings with cognitive limits and flaws, we are simply incapable of completely closing the Gap. I simply do not have the capacity to think constantly of those that my friends have loved and lost. I can't surgically remove the weight of their grief and attach it to myself. But that's not really the point. Because even when my friends felt a Grand Canyon away, one baby step toward me, one "hey, I've been thinking about you," made a world of difference. Suddenly it didn't matter how wide the Gap was because someone was disregarding it and moving in my direction. The point is to take the steps, trusting that those steps make a difference, despite knowing we can never close the Gap completely. To know, logically, that you cannot feel what I feel, you cannot stand on the South Rim with me, and you cannot bring me to the North Rim right now, because there is cement around my ankles and I am scheduled to be here on the South Rim for a while, and you cannot come over here because I am grieving a person you never met. But you will try to walk toward me anyway because despite the distance being miles, despite knowing you cannot stand where I stand, we both believe it is better for us to be a little bit closer. And although most of the time the distance feels like a Grand Canyon apart, you take one step toward me and I realize we are actually only a few feet away. Taking that step is witnessing someone's pain, and it's actually a deeply Christian philosophy.

My constant fixation on the Gap eventually sparked a spiritual metamorphosis inside of me, in which I realized that even when it felt like everyone was on the North Rim, there was someone standing on the South Rim with me, and His name was Jesus Christ, and that changed my life.

I recently moved to a new state and people here often ask me why I've decided to remain a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints after all these years, after all these controversies, after all these Hulu shows. Last year I came to understand that one of the most important things we can do with our lives is to try to minimize the Gap. I then realized that when I was baptized at 8 years old, I made a covenant to "mourn with those that mourn, comfort those that stand in need of comfort." Fifteen years ago, I promised God Himself that I would do my very best to Mind the Gap.

I've thought a lot about what Minding the Gap looks like in practice. Firstly, I think we are too avoidant with grief. When you've lost someone, people fear accidentally "bringing it up." But why? I'm thinking about him all the time anyway so there's no way to remind me. He's already on my mind. And what's more, he's on my mind, but I don't know if I can say that out loud because I don't want to make you uncomfortable or make things awkward. But when you're thinking about something for hours and hours for a day, and you're not saying the thing out loud, you are drowning yourself. You are taking too many breaths in with not enough breaths out.

Navigating the social parameters of talking about death began to feel like carrying a bulky gray plastic thing around at all times. I stumbled under it's awkwardness and often floated to the perimeters of social conversation, standing at a distance where I had space for this bulky gray thing without bumping anyone's heads. I couldn't decide whether to speak in past or present tense, so I said nothing at all. But then saying nothing felt like a dishonoring, and I felt guilty, and I was trying to master this social perimeter of talking about (or avoiding talking about?) death but I was already too exhausted in my heart from holding the weight of loss that I didn't quite know how to manage the bulk of it too. And that is when the bulky gray thing was the most bulky and gray.

But sometimes I was relieved of the bulk! When someone asked directly about him, the bulky gray thing disappeared. I did not need to worry about making it awkward. I did not need to use the phrase "sorry if I am trauma-dumping". I did not need to apologize for the heaviness of a situation that was not my fault at all, that I did not feel equipped to carry in the first place. I did not need to rationalize, preface, feign, back-pedal, or pretend. I could take a breath out. I could look across the huge mouth Grand Canyon and see it closing.

I do not subscribe to kitschy phrases like "you don't owe anyone anything" or "put yourself first." I understand the sentiment behind them, I understand self care, I understand extreme people-pleasing. I will take care of myself and love myself and be kind to myself but I will never subscribe to the belief that I am in any way more important than or better than anyone else. I do not want to live in a world where no one owes each other anything. We owe each other visibility at the very least and more commonly we owe each other love. We owe each other listening ears and cry-on-me shoulders. We owe it to each other to make a priority of trying to close the Gap. I truly believe we are indebted to each other for these things.

The Gap is an inevitable. Not only in times of grief—the loneliness of the pain is a poltergeist that accompanies any of life's challenges. And the most discouraging thing about the Gap is that it cannot be closed. This is where the metaphor starts to break down because the physical world does not entirely encapsulate the emotional world. Because why would anyone start a hike they knew was impossible to finish? We cannot close the Gap. No amount of consolatory texts, therapeutic conversations, condolences flowers, home-cooked meals, apologetic hugs, tears shed, or errands run will make that distance 0. But, the steps still matter.

The steps matter because they eradicate the bulky gray thing and they lighten the horrible weight. The steps matter because God or evolution or both decided that emotional intelligence was just as necessary to our survival as technological intelligence, otherwise we wouldn't have it. The steps matter because there will be days where your heart is too exhausted to look at your scar left by the scalding flame and so someone else will witness it for you. And when that happens, it will be easy and obvious to see why the steps are so important, despite it all. Despite the impossibility of the goal they're trying to achieve. Empathy is the greatest underdog story we have.