Good Grief

There’s this version of grief that no one really prepares you for.. the quiet kind that shows up after everything else has already happened and time moves on.

After the calls. After the arrangements. After everyone tells you they’re sorry for your loss.

It’s the version that lingers in ordinary moments. The ones that used to feel automatic.

My first Christmas without my dad was one of those moments.

I didn’t know what to do with it. So I did something small, maybe even strange… I put on Jack Frost with Michael Keaton. Not because it’s some cinematic masterpiece lol but because my sister and I used to joke that our dad looked like him.

He didn’t, really.

It was something about the energy: Mr. Mom, Beetlejuice, that slightly chaotic, warm, quick-witted presence. My dad had that. Electric, in a way that made a room feel lighter just by him being in it.

Watching that movie wasn’t comforting in the traditional sense. It didn’t make anything easier. But it did something else, it made me sit in it. It made me miss him, directly without distraction.

And that felt… important. Though my sister thought it was a bit harsh to do solo.

Since then, I’ve found myself almost intentionally walking toward that feeling. Through films, through stories. Anything that touches on loss, complicated relationships with parents or on the things we don’t always know how to say while someone is still here.

I recently watched Sentimental Value. It’s a film about grief but also about art itself. About how we process loss through creation. There’s a film within the film, a kind of mirror being held up and it blurs the line between memory and storytelling. It doesn’t hand you the emotion. It lets it sit with you. In that way it felt familiar. Like grief does.

Then there was The Pitt—a show that at times, felt almost too close. Specific in ways I wasn’t ready for. It mirrored parts of what my dad went through medically and how things unfolded.

That one didn’t feel like a choice. It felt like a confrontation. There were moments I wanted to turn it off. Moments where I probably should have. But I didn’t.

Because somewhere along the way, I realized that avoiding those feelings wasn’t actually helping me carry them. It was just delaying them. Grief doesn’t really go away, it only changes shape.

For a while, I thought being strong meant keeping it contained… pushing forward, showing up for my family, being a rock for my mom and my sister. And there’s truth in that. There’s responsibility in being there for the people who are still here.

But there’s also something just as important in allowing yourself to feel it-fully.

Not just the good memories—the easy ones we reach for—but the harder ones too. The ones that are tangled up in hospitals, in uncertainty, in the slow realization of what’s happening.

Even those moments hold something.

They’re still him.

That’s the part I didn’t expect—that even the painful memories are a form of presence. They’re proof that he was here. That he mattered. That he shaped the way I see the world.

Art: music, films, shows, stories… all have become a kind of bridge for me. A way to access those feelings without being completely overwhelmed by them. A reminder that none of this is isolated, even when it feels deeply personal.

Loss is universal. Grief is shared, even if it looks different for everyone.

Somehow that makes it a little less heavy

I still miss him. That hasn’t changed. Never will.

But I’ve started to understand that missing him isn’t something to move past, it’s something to carry. And in carrying it, there’s a way his presence continues.

Not just in the good memories, but in all of it. Even the hard parts.

Especially the hard parts.

Love you Dad.