The Weight of Absence

I’ve been struggling lately.

Not because something terrible happened today, but because grief doesn’t follow a calendar. It waits. It hides quietly beneath the surface until something beautiful happens… and then suddenly, the person you want to tell the most isn’t there.

Yesterday I received one of the greatest honors of my life.

Graceland sent me a letter confirming that my artwork, THE KING, inspired by Elvis Presley and created in honor of my mother, has officially become part of their permanent archive.

For a moment, I felt pure joy.

Then, almost immediately, I wanted to call my mom.

And that’s when the absence hit me all over again.

People often say grief gets easier.

That hasn’t been my experience.

It comes in waves.

Sometimes those waves are so powerful they knock the air out of me.

To understand why, I have to take you back to 2019.

At the time, I was living in Denver, leading mindfulness and meditation programs inside a Colorado prison. Over the course of that work, I sat with more than two thousand incarcerated men in minimum, medium, and maximum security.

People often ask me how I could become so close to men in prison.

The answer is simple.

The first thing I told every man who walked into one of my sessions was this:

“I don’t want to know why you’re here.”

I wasn’t interested in the worst thing they had ever done.

I wasn’t there to judge them or define them by their past.

I was only concerned with one thing—that they left that place better than they entered it. That they found peace within themselves. That they understood redemption belongs to anyone willing to look honestly at the darkest parts of who they are.

Because every one of us has darkness.

The difference is whether we’re willing to face it.

If we refuse, it eventually destroys us.

But I have to tell you something else.

Those men did something extraordinary for me.

They accepted me.

For the first time in my life, I experienced genuine acceptance from other men.

That probably sounds strange.

But I grew up surrounded by ultra-masculine men who never accepted me. I was punished for being different. I spent much of my life believing something was fundamentally wrong with me simply because I wasn’t who they expected me to be.

Then I walked into a prison.

And the place I expected to find the least compassion became the place where I found the most.

Every day I left emotionally exhausted.

I didn’t own a car, so I walked to the train, rode for an hour back home, and cried almost the entire way.

The ride to the prison prepared me for what I was about to carry.

The ride home helped me survive what I had carried.

Around that same time, my father was diagnosed with terminal lung disease.

Doctors gave him seven months to live.

Our relationship had always been painfully complicated.

He never accepted me for who I was. He spent much of my life trying to change me, control me, or convince me I was someone I wasn’t.

By then, I had finally begun creating enough distance to discover the person I truly was.

Yet I still flew to California over and over again.

Nine trips in seven months.

I wasn’t doing it for him.

I was doing it because I loved my mother.

Every visit lasted several days.

I helped care for my father as his body slowly failed him. I lifted him. Helped him to the bathroom. Watched him struggle for every breath through endless oxygen tubing.

Even then…

he rarely looked at me.

He remained angry until the very end.

But something unexpected happened during those months.

The brother closest to me in age invited my partner and me over for dinner.

That night changed everything.

He apologized.

He apologized for years of rejection.

He told me he loved me.

He asked if we could begin again.

It was one of the most meaningful conversations of my life.

During those same months, I never stopped showing up for the men at the prison.

They walked beside me through every step of my father’s decline.

I shared my fears, my exhaustion, and the complicated emotions I carried.

Many of them understood because they too had complicated relationships with their fathers.

They wrote me letters.

Hundreds of handwritten letters.

I still have every one of them.

Letters filled with honesty.

Hope.

Gratitude.

Forgiveness.

Love.

I don’t think those men will ever truly know what those letters meant to me.

Then one afternoon, while sitting in a meditation session, my phone rang.

My father had died.

I didn’t cry.

In fact…

I never have.

For years I wondered if that made me a terrible person.

Eventually I realized it wasn’t hatred.

It was relief.

One of the heaviest chains I had carried my entire life had finally broken.

But grief is complicated.

Sometimes relief and grief exist together.

And sometimes the hardest losses are still waiting for you.

COVID arrived only a few months later.

The world shut down almost overnight.

The prison closed.

Just like that, I lost the work that had become my purpose.

Those men had become part of my life, and suddenly they were gone.

I often wonder about them.

I wonder if they ever found the peace we spent so many hours searching for together.

I wonder if they know I still carry them with me.

For me, the silence was deafening.

My partner was considered an essential worker, so while he spent his days at the grocery store, I spent most of mine alone.

Completely alone.

Isolation became the perfect environment for addiction to grow.

My drinking became heavier.

The drugs became more frequent.

Eventually they became my way of surviving emotions I didn’t know how to carry.

No one knew.

I became very good at pretending I was okay.

The brother who had apologized to me kept calling.

At least twice a week, on his drive home from work, he’d check in just to make sure I was alright.

He knew I was struggling with my father’s death.

He didn’t know I was slowly disappearing beneath my addiction.

I hid it well.

We talked on the phone for his fifty-sixth birthday.

Four days later, I decided to go for a long walk to clear my head.

Without thinking, I left my phone at the apartment.

When I returned, there were dozens of missed calls and voicemails from my family.

My heart dropped.

I was certain my mother had died.

I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the messages alone.

I called my partner at work and begged him to come home immediately.

In my panic, I called the store where he worked.

When I asked for him, the employee misunderstood the name.

“I’m sorry,” they said. “He didn’t make it to work today.”

Time stopped.

My mind immediately convinced itself that he had been in a terrible accident.

I remember screaming into the phone, asking why no one had called me if he hadn’t shown up.

Then the employee paused.

“Oh my God,” they said.

“I thought you were asking about someone else.”

A few seconds later they came back.

“He’s here. We’ll send him home.”

The relief lasted only a moment.

Before he could even walk through the front door, my sister called.

My brother was on life support.

Doctors were preparing to remove it.

She asked if I wanted to say anything.

She would hold the phone to his ear.

I didn’t even know what had happened.

I could barely breathe.

All I could say was,

“I love you.”

Again.

“I love you.”

Again.

“I love you.”

Those were the last words I ever spoke to him.

A ruptured intestine had sent him into septic shock.

He was gone almost instantly.

He was only fifty-six years old.

The one person in my family who had reached across decades of pain…

The one person who had looked me in the eyes and said, “Let’s begin again…”

was gone.

Six months after my father.

I don’t think I have words big enough to describe what that did to me.

The addiction tightened its grip.

My mother was destroyed.

She had lost the man she’d shared sixty years of her life with.

Then, only months later, she lost one of her children.

She was never the same.

None of us were.

Our family had always been fractured.

Now it simply collapsed beneath the weight of grief.

Everything felt like it was falling apart.

The world.

My family.

My mind.

My life.

Desperate to escape, my partner and I packed what little we had left and moved to Fort Lauderdale.

In one of the worst decisions grief ever convinced me to make, we sold nearly everything we owned for three thousand dollars, loaded the rest into a cargo van, and drove across the country looking for something neither of us could quite name.

Hope.

Healing.

A fresh start.

Florida was beautiful.

The beaches were quiet because of COVID.

The ocean seemed endless.

But grief doesn’t care how beautiful the view is.

It follows you.

I convinced myself that if I could just get my mom to Florida, everything would somehow be okay.

I imagined us walking the beach together.

Watching the sunrise.

Starting over.

Finally finding peace.

Then my phone rang.

My mother had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia.

There was no treatment.

No cure.

Only time.

The doctors estimated she had three months.

COVID kept us apart.

We cried together over the phone.

We told each other we loved each other more times than I can count.

Two months later…

she was gone.

And suddenly I wasn’t grieving one person.

I was grieving my father.

My brother.

My mother.

The family I had hoped could still heal.

The future I believed was still possible.

The life I thought I was supposed to have.

People sometimes ask me how I survived all of that.

The truth is…

there were days I honestly don’t know.

After my mother’s death, my partner and I returned to California.

For eight months we lived alone on my family’s ranch.

It was the quietest place I had ever known.

And somehow…

it had never felt louder.

Every room carried a memory.

Every sunrise reminded me of who was missing.

Every evening ended with the same unbearable silence.

I was trying to grieve three unimaginable losses while pretending addiction wasn’t quietly taking my life too.

Eventually we left the ranch and moved to St. Louis.

We weren’t just changing cities.

We were searching for another chance.

A chance to build a life instead of simply surviving one.

But grief has a way of packing itself into every suitcase.

And so does addiction.

By the time I arrived in St. Louis, I was exhausted.

Not just physically.

Spiritually.

Emotionally.

I had spent years surviving.

Years carrying grief I didn’t know how to put down.

Years convincing myself that one more drink or one more escape might quiet the ache.

It never did.

The grief remained.

It was simply waiting for me every morning.

Eventually I reached a place where I could no longer pretend I was in control.

I had spent years helping other people search for peace.

Now I had to admit I couldn’t find my own.

Two years ago, I walked through the doors of the Betty Ford Center and asked for help.

That decision changed my life.

Not because it erased my grief.

It didn’t.

Not because it brought back the people I love.

It couldn’t.

It changed my life because, for the first time, I learned that healing isn’t the absence of pain.

Healing is learning how to carry pain without allowing it to carry you.

I learned that grief isn’t something you conquer.

It becomes something you learn to live beside.

I learned that recovery isn’t about forgetting the past.

It’s about refusing to let the past decide the rest of your life.

Most importantly, I learned something I wish I had understood decades earlier.

Authenticity is its own kind of freedom.

Looking back now, I can see something I was completely incapable of seeing while I was living through it.

I would never choose the losses.

If someone offered me one more day with my father, my brother, or my mother, I wouldn’t hesitate.

I would give almost anything for one more conversation with each of them.

But I can also see that surviving those losses broke something else.

The chains that had bound me for most of my life.

The expectations.

The fear.

The shame.

The belief that I had to become someone else to deserve love.

For so many years, I was trying to earn acceptance from people who simply couldn’t give it.

Ironically, the first place I ever truly found that acceptance was inside a prison.

And the greatest freedom I’ve ever experienced came years later, when I finally stopped imprisoning myself.

Today, I still grieve.

Some days, like today, the waves are overwhelming.

Yesterday, when I opened that letter from Graceland, I smiled through tears.

Not because I doubted what it meant.

But because all I wanted in that moment was to call my mom and say,

“Mom… you’ll never believe what happened.”

I wanted to hear her excitement.

I wanted to hear her laugh.

I wanted to tell her that the artwork I created in her honor had found a permanent home.

Instead…

I sat with the silence.

That silence still hurts.

I suspect it always will.

But today I understand something I couldn’t understand back then.

Love doesn’t end when someone dies.

It changes form.

I carry my father in the forgiveness I fought to find.

I carry my brother in every reminder to tell people I love them while I still can.

I carry my mother in every piece of art I create.

She is woven into every color.

Every line.

Every story.

Every dream that still refuses to die.

People sometimes tell me how resilient I am.

The truth is, resilience isn’t something you’re born with.

It’s something grief teaches you when you have no other choice.

If you’ve read this far, thank you for walking beside me.

Maybe you’ve lost someone too.

Maybe you’re carrying an invisible grief that no one else can see.

Maybe you’re fighting an addiction.

Maybe you’re trying to forgive someone.

Or maybe you’re simply trying to find yourself after years of pretending to be someone else.

If that’s you…

I want you to know something I once needed someone to tell me.

You are not beyond redemption.

You are not beyond healing.

You are not beyond love.

I learned that from men the world had given up on.

I learned it again in recovery.

And I try to remember it every day I step into my studio.

Because every piece of art I create is an act of hope.

Every color is a declaration that beauty can still exist after heartbreak.

Every finished piece is proof that pain can be transformed into something that outlives us.

The Weight of Absence will always be part of my story.

But it is no longer the only story I have to tell.

Today, I choose to tell another one.

A story of recovery.

A story of redemption.

A story of authenticity.

A story of love that refused to die.

And if there is one thing I hope my life leaves behind, it is this:

No matter how much life has taken from you…

No matter how impossible tomorrow feels…

No matter how heavy your grief becomes…

There is still a way forward.

There is still beauty waiting to be created.

There is still love waiting to be given.

And somehow…

against all odds…

there is still light.