At seventeen years old, I thought I already understood what grief felt like. I had lost my mother at twelve and my father only a year earlier. I thought nothing could hurt worse than standing beside hospital beds, hearing bad news, and learning how quickly a family could fall apart.
I was wrong. Sometimes the deepest pain does not come from losing the people you love. Sometimes it comes from watching someone try to erase what they left behind.
My younger brother, Noah, was only fifteen, but after our father died, he seemed to age overnight. He stopped laughing loudly. He stopped leaving his sketchbooks around…
