01/04/2026
Anyone read this book?
The phone rang at 8:47 p.m. I know the exact time because I've replayed it ten thousand times since, like if I can just understand the moment better, I can somehow undo it. But understanding doesn't undo anything. It was my sister's number. And before I even answered, some part of me knew. You always know. Your body knows before your brain catches up that the world just ended and somehow you're still in it.
"There's been an accident."
Four words. That's all it took to cleave my life in two. Before the call: my brother was alive, annoying, supposed to visit next month, owed me twenty dollars, existed in the world as a permanent fact. After the call: he was gone. Just... gone. Just driving home from work on a Tuesday and then, nothing. No goodbye. No last conversation. No chance to say any of the thousand things I'd been postponing because I thought we had time.
We always think we have time. I spent the first week in shock, the kind where you're moving and talking and planning a funeral but you're not actually there. You're floating somewhere above your body watching this nightmare happen to someone who looks like you. And then the shock wore off and I was left with this: a grief so massive it had its own gravity, pulling everything into it. I couldn't breathe right. Couldn't sleep. Couldn't figure out how to exist in a world where my brother didn't.
Four Truths About the Grief Nobody Prepares You For
1. Sudden Death Doesn't Just Take a Person, It Breaks Reality Itself
Noel and Blair name something I couldn't articulate: sudden death is different. When someone dies after illness, you have time. Time to say goodbye. Time to prepare. But sudden death? One moment they exist, the next they don't, and your brain can't process it. Keeps expecting them to walk through the door because they were just here, just alive, just real.
I kept texting my brother. For weeks. Automatic texts about nothing, memes, questions, family drama. And each time, a second after I hit send, I'd remember. He's dead. He's never going to respond. And I'd have to re-experience the loss, fresh, like it just happened. The book gave me permission to admit: I feel crazy. I feel like reality has broken. And that's not pathology, that's what happens when someone vanishes without warning.
2. There's No "Right Way" to Grieve; There's Only Survival
Everyone has opinions about how you should grieve. How long you should be sad. When you should "move on." Whether you're crying too much or not enough. All of it makes it worse. Noel and Blair gave me the only permission that mattered: there's no right way. Some days I can function. Some days I can't get out of bed. Some days I want to talk about him constantly. Some days hearing his name feels like a knife. None of this is wrong. All of it is grief.
I stopped apologizing for how I was grieving. Stopped performing "healing" for people uncomfortable with my sadness. Started being honest: "I'm not okay. I might never be okay in the way you mean. But I'm surviving." The book taught me: survival is enough. You don't have to be brave or grateful or finding meaning. You just have to wake up and breathe and get through another day.
3. You're Not Just Losing One Person; You're Losing a Thousand Futures
Losing my brother wasn't one loss. It was a thousand. I lost the person who shared my childhood. I lost my future, all the moments we'll never have. His wedding. His kids. Growing old together. I lost my identity as someone with a sibling. I lost the version of myself who thought bad things happened to other people.
Noel and Blair name these secondary losses, validate them. And this helped because I'd been feeling guilty for grieving things that hadn't happened yet. But sudden death doesn't just take the past; it takes every future possibility. Every assumed milestone. You're allowed to mourn all of it, not just the person, but the entire life you thought you were going to have with them in it.
4. You Don't "Get Over It." You Learn to Carry It
Here's the lie: "Time heals all wounds." Bu****it. Time doesn't heal sudden loss. Time just teaches you how to function while carrying a grief that never gets smaller. You don't move on. You don't get closure. You just learn to live with a wound that doesn't close. You build your life around the absence. You get stronger at carrying the weight. But the weight doesn't go away.
Noel and Blair were honest in a way that felt like relief. They didn't promise I'd heal. They promised I'd survive. That the acute, unbearable agony would become a chronic, bearable ache. That I'd have good days mixed with devastating ones. That I'd laugh again and it wouldn't mean I'd forgotten him. I'm two years out now. They were right. It's not better. It's just different. The grief is part of me now, part of how I move through the world, part of what makes me grab my phone at 2 a.m. terrified of getting another call like the one that destroyed everything.
I Wasn't Ready to Say Goodbye didn't bring my brother back, it didn't make the grief smaller. I mean, I still have my brother's number in my phone. I still have the urge to call or text him. But the book gave me company. Proof that other people have survived sudden loss and are still here, still breathing, still carrying people they weren't ready to say goodbye to.
I recommend this book to you you're drowning in a grief that has no stages, no timeline, no acceptable end point. If people keep telling you to move on and you want to scream. If you need someone to tell you the truth: it doesn't get better. You just get stronger at carrying it.
Because we weren't ready to say goodbye. We'll never be ready. But we're still here. Still surviving. Still carrying them with us into every day they should have been part of. And that, somehow, impossibly, is its own kind of love.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/4pkXItW
