A few days ago, a family member posted an old photograph. My uncle Tom, midair, arms out, sixty years old and laughing, dropping off a limestone bluff into the Illinois River while the rest of us screamed with joy from the water below. I hadn’t seen that photo in decades. I stared at my phone for a long time before I could set it down.
I am eighty-one years old. I have lost so many of the men who shaped me — friends, mentors, the whole cohort of people who knew who I was before I became whoever I am now. I had gotten, I thought, reasonably good at carrying that. And then a photograph shows up in my feed on an ordinary Tuesday and I am undone.
Cocktail Hour
For years, at five o’clock, I would mix a drink, sit down on my front porch, and call my Uncle Tom. He was my mother’s brother, a lawyer who became a Federal Magistrate in Wichita, and he was, without question, one of the most influential men of my life. He had a dry sense of humor that never announced itself — you had to be listening for it, and then it would land and you’d be laughing before you understood why. He carried himself with a quiet dignity I’ve spent my whole life trying to earn a fraction of.
We talked about nothing in particular. That was the point. He was the man I turned to for wit and wisdom, in a way I never quite had words for while he was alive — I just knew that five o’clock felt different with him on the other end of the line.
He died of a rare form of skin cancer, after years of treatments and surgeries that wore him down by degrees. It was an awful way for a life like his to end, and I have never made peace with how unfair it was.
What I didn’t expect is that his absence wouldn’t behave the way I thought grief was supposed to behave. I assumed there would be a hard stretch, and then a kind of leveling off — the stages doing their work, in order, until I arrived somewhere calmer. That isn’t what happened. Grief researchers have a better model for it than the old five-stages idea: they describe it as a “W” rather than a staircase. Steady for months, sometimes longer. Then, without warning, a photograph, and you’re back at the bottom of the letter, exactly where you started.
The Jump
Back in the 1980s, our family used to gather at the Illinois River for reunions — canoeing, floating, the whole scenic stretch of it. There’s a spot along the river, accessible only from the water, where limestone bluffs rise twelve to fifteen feet above the surface. People jump. We had told Tom about it for years, and that particular summer, we insisted he had to do it himself.
He must have been around sixty. He climbed up, stood at the edge a moment, and jumped — and the whole family erupted. Screaming, applauding, the kind of joy nobody has to manufacture. I have fifty black-and-white photographs I’ve shot over the years hanging in my home office, family and friends, keeping me company while I work. That jump wasn’t one of them. It didn’t need to be — I remembered it perfectly, or thought I did, until the photograph resurfaced and I realized how much of it had gone soft at the edges without my noticing.
That’s the part that catches me. It isn’t the sad moments I lost track of. It’s the joyful ones. I’d been so careful, all these years, tending to the grief that I let the jump itself blur.
It isn’t the sad moments I lost track of. It’s the joyful ones.
What I Recognized in Myself
I went looking, afterward, for some explanation of a single photograph could do what it did, and I found more of myself in the research than I expected. Men are often raised toward self-control above almost everything else, and that training doesn’t switch off just because the loss is real. What researchers call “masked grief” tends to show up less as tears and more as restlessness, overwork, a short fuse over something small — a kind of quiet escape from a pain that was never given anywhere to go. I don’t think I masked mine so much as postponed it. I kept busy. I told myself I’d already done my grieving for Tom, in the years right after he died, and that this was settled business. The photograph told me otherwise.
It isn’t only the mind that carries this. The body does its own accounting. Researchers have found a sharply elevated risk of heart attack and stroke in the weeks immediately following a major loss, and that chronic loneliness afterward can trigger the same inflammatory stress response the body uses to fight off a physical threat — as if grief itself were something to be defended against. I don’t say this to be dramatic. I say it because it changed how I think about that ache in my chest when I saw Tom in the air. It wasn’t only sentiment. Something physical was happening too.
None of this requires a diagnosis, and I want to be clear about that. Most people move through a loss like this without professional help — researchers put the number as high as 85 percent of the bereaved coping well within two years, through nothing more exotic than time and the people around them. I believe that, because it’s mostly been true for me. But I’ve also learned that “coping well” doesn’t mean the loss stays finished. It just means you’ve found a place to set it down most days. A photograph can still pick it back up.
Sadness and Gratitude, in the Same Breath
Seeing Tom in midair, sixty years old and fearless for the length of one afternoon, I felt the full weight of missing him and the full weight of having had him, in the same instant, with no seam between the two. Sadness. Loneliness. And underneath both of them, gratitude so large it was hard to tell where one feeling ended and the next began.
The ache and the gratitude are not competing for the same space.
I used to think I was supposed to sort those into separate boxes — grieve first, be grateful later, in that order, like courses at a meal. I don’t believe that anymore. The ache and the gratitude are not competing for the same space. They’re proof of the same thing: that the friendship was real enough to still hold this kind of power over me, forty years on.
What I'd Say to Another Man
If you’re carrying this same kind of loss — not one death, but the slow erosion of the men who made you who you are — I don’t have tidy advice. But I’d tell you this: stop trying to sort the grief from the gratitude. The ache you feel looking at an old photograph is not evidence that you haven’t healed. It’s evidence the friendship mattered enough to still reach you, all these years later.
Let it ambush you. Don’t brace against it when it comes. And when it does, say his name out loud to somebody — tell your kids about the bluff, about the porch, about the phone calls at five o’clock. It costs you nothing, and it keeps him from disappearing twice.
I still miss my Uncle Tom every single day. I am also, in the same breath, enormously grateful I had him at all. I no longer see any reason to choose between those two things.
