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Grief doesn’t move in a straight line. It arrives in waves, in grocery stores, in the middle of songs you thought you’d forgotten. In these essays, I write about what it actually feels like to lose someone — not the cleaned-up version, but the raw, inconvenient, sometimes embarrassing truth of it. These are dispatches from the long aftermath. A reflective portrait

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What grief looks like here

I don’t write about grief from a safe distance. These essays sit inside the experience — in the specific, sensory details of absence that nobody tells you about beforehand. The way a person’s handwriting can undo you. The guilt of laughing too soon. The strange loneliness of grief that has no public ceremony, no casserole brigade, no clear social script.
These aren’t grief guides. There are no five stages listed, no instructions for moving on. I’m not interested in wrapping loss into something tidy. If you come looking for closure, you won’t find it here — but you might find something more honest than that.

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Why I write about this

Loss has a way of forcing a reckoning with the life you were living before it arrived. I write about grief because I have lived inside it, and because I found that almost nobody was writing about it the way it actually feels — messy, recursive, threaded through ordinary days long after the world expects you to be fine. These essays are an attempt to be honest about that.

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What you’ll find when you read

You’ll find yourself recognized. These essays name the things grief does that you thought were unique to you — the irrational rituals, the bargaining, the sudden and unexpected returns of feeling. Reading them doesn’t fix anything, but it can ease the particular isolation of mourning. You are not the only one who has stood in a parking lot unable to start the car.

Divorce

How a marriage ends — the paperwork, the pain, and what remains.

Darkest Hours

Essays written in the depths — when grief is at its heaviest and survival is uncertain.

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On reading these essays

Grief essays are not easy reads. They ask something of you. But they also give something back — the sense that your own losses have weight, that they are worth naming, that you are not alone in the strange country of mourning.
These essays are published on Substack. Subscribe at lifeonafaultline.substack.com to read them in full and receive new essays when they arrive.