As many of you know, I’ve been dealt—IMHO—more than my fair share of grief. I’ve written extensively about loss: about Dexter and Luna, my beloved furbabies who were taken from me in the most brutal ways, and about the friends and family I’ve lost through the years.

Grief is complicated. It depends on the relationship you had—or still feel—with the person or animal who’s no longer here. And no one really wants to talk about it because it’s messy, unpredictable, and uncomfortable.

For me, the grief surrounding Dexter and Luna is especially tangled. Luna died in my arms on July 26, 2018. I was helpless. I didn’t know what to do. I’ve since made peace with the belief that a monster was responsible for her passing. And just days later, my longtime close friend Steven Yang passed away on July 28, 2018, from complications related to dialysis.

It didn’t stop there. My uncle Louis Norton passed on October 3, 2018. I went to his wake on October 7. The very next day, I came home to find Dexter dead—under my bed on October 8, 2018.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this fucked me up and I’m not mincing words around it.

That year, I lost four beings I loved, and each loss felt cruelly intertwined. And the grief didn’t stop in 2018. On March 31, 2020, my Aunt Louise Norton died. My cousin Nancy Wolfe—my favorite cheerleader—died on April 24, 2020. Kim Hall passed away on June 19, 2020. Heather Norton followed on June 17, 2024.

I found out my ex-husband, Scott Moore, died on October 20, 2024—but I wasn’t told until February 2025. And I was already physically broken: pneumonia had me down for months, and my Grandmother Patricia had just been sent home on hospice

Then my Aunt Suzie Barber Feight passed—on my birthday, April 20, 2025. And not long after that, on May 13—my cousin Jasmine’s birthday—my Grandmother Patricia Barber died.

That’s a lot of death. And yes, people and furbabies die every day—but for the living, it sucks

I am in therapy. I attend mindfulness and DBT groups. I have a psychiatrist I’ve worked with for years. These aren’t just things I do—they’re lifelines helping me cope with grief, trauma, and everything else that keeps crashing into my life.

It isn’t easy. We have to keep living. We have to keep moving. But when you’re hit over and over again, something has to give.

We need to be gentle with ourselves. Most of us aren’t. I know I’m not.

We rush through our feelings so we don’t burden anyone else. We bury what hurts just to survive the day. I often feel that if I open up—if I tell people how the fuck I’m actually feeling—I’m being “too much.” That I’m dragging the mood down. That I should change the subject instead of saying, “I miss them. I hurt. And I don’t know what to do.”