It was November 25, 2018. I just recall sitting in front of the fire, watching the flames dance as I realized that it had gone dark outside. Then again, it was dark when my day started at 3 a.m. The house was silent. Much too silent.
No more squeaking wheelchair wheels across the hardwood, no soft hum of the motor, no laughter or dad jokes echoing through our 200-year-old farmhouse. The quiet hit harder than anything. It’s that kind of silence that screams.
A few weeks earlier I’d been at school in Virginia, counting down the days until graduation. Halloween was coming and I was feeling nervous, too, but mostly just proud. I couldn’t wait to walk across that stage and to find my dad’s face in the crowd, his big, proud grin stretching from ear to ear. But that dream disappeared with one phone call.
My stepmom, Holly, called to say Dad was entering hospice. I remember sitting in my car, sobbing until I couldn’t breathe. At 21, I was about to lose the most important person in my life: my dad, my person.
My dad, Mark, was born with cerebral palsy and spent his entire life proving people wrong. He grew up poor, in a broken home, and still built something remarkable. He earned a master’s degree, became a writer and poet, and founded an online community called Wheelchair junkie, where people with disabilities could connect, vent, laugh, and feel seen. I’d watch him at night, typing away at his computer helping strangers, encouraging them, while still finding time to be my dad.
And through it all, he never complained.
When my mom’s mental illness worsened, he became a single father raising me while managing his own disability. Later, when he remarried, it seemed like a second chance for him. For the first time in years, he was really happy.
Then came 2017. Cancer. Esophageal. He fought it the only way he knew how-head-on, with humor and hope. But by 2018, it had spread. By Halloween, he was in hospice. Three weeks later, in the still of early morning, holding Holly’s hand, he silently slipped away.
It broke me when I lost him. I was 21 years old, just days from graduation, and suddenly was fatherless. I had no idea how to exist in the world without him leading it. I tried attending grief groups, but everyone was decades older. My friends did not understand. I felt like I was walking through fog: surrounded by people and completely alone.
Two years later, it shattered again. On October 1, 2020, I got another call-my mom was found dead. She’d battled addiction and mental illness most of my life, and our relationship was complicated. We barely spoke. I thought I’d prepared myself for that moment, but nothing could have prepared me for the reality of it. At 23, I was an orphan.
For so long, I only saw my mom through the lens of pain: her addiction, her absence, her broken promises. But after she died, I began to see her as a person-a woman who had dreams of writing, of family, of feeling normal. She wasn’t evil or heartless-she was sick. And seeing that brought guilt, but also forgiveness.
Losing both my parents before I was 25 changed me in every way. I live with anxiety now, always bracing for the next loss. Yet grief has also softened me, made me more patient, more alive. I’ve learned that grief doesn’t ever fade; it just settles in. It builds a home inside you, rearranging the furniture every so often, but it never leaves.
It stays, quiet but always present.
There’s still a part of me that reaches for them every day. But I carry them with me in my humor, my compassion, my stubbornness, my drive. They live in the way I love, the way I listen, and the way I show up for others.
I am my parents’ legacy. And though grief will always be a part of me, so will they.
