The Absence That Carries Weight

By Ryan McMillian

I lost two sons in seven months. In that same span of time, I crossed state lines, shifted between multiple work locations, and learned how to mentally sidestep and emotionally pivot just enough to maintain the appearance of being "put together." Not for myself, but so that life could continue to function. I say that, but I have a confession to make. Instead of feeling sad, I feel empty. Not completely numb, but distant. There's frustration. There's fatigue, more than I admit openly. But sadness, sadness does not quite sit where I expected it to. It feels far away, almost inaccessible. What remains is something quieter, something like apathy, or a muted detachment. It just exists at a distance from me.

And I hesitate to call it grief. Not because I don't understand what grief is, but because calling it grief feels like an excuse. I use that word intentionally. An excuse. A performance of sympathy rather than something earned. As if sadness must be justified, measured by memories made or time spent. You see, my sons were only 17 and 18 weeks old. I never got to make memories with them. I never formed bonds in the traditional sense, never disciplined them, never conversed with them, never watched them grow, never celebrated milestones, never experienced disappointment or pride as people understand those things. So, the idea of grieving them feels, at times, like a kind of theft, as if I would be claiming something I did not fully possess. I can't grieve them, at least not in the way I think I'm supposed to. I can only grieve what could have been.

And yet something did happen. When I learned they were coming, something in me shifted. What I had buried, the desire to be a father, the desire to leave a legacy, rose back up. It was not subtle. It leapt out of the dirt. Suddenly, I remembered that I never wanted to be a career Sam's Club employee. That I hated retail. That never really went away, but I had learned to manage it, to redirect that energy into promotion, into responsibility, into stability. I found ways to motivate myself to give more and more of my energy to something I never truly intended to define me. But when fatherhood returned to the table, everything reframed itself. The original blueprint, the one that had been sealed away and mummified, was opened again. It was a new start, but it belonged to an old dream. For a moment, I wasn't just maintaining, I was becoming.

And then just as quickly as that hope found me, it escaped me.

Not much of anything is left. Or maybe that's not entirely accurate. Maybe what's left is something I have not yet fully identified. I spoke about my grief out loud recently, not internally, not as passing thought, but spoken in a way that others could hear it. It was not a pleasant experience. Because when I heard it, it did not sound like grief. It sounded distant. Observational. As if I were describing something rather than living inside of it. And maybe that's where the conflict sits. Not in whether I feel something, but in whether I allow myself to recognize it in the form it has chosen to take.

There was a moment that defines the gravity of all of this.

His heart is beating, and still there is nothing we can do to prevent what is coming. That is what sadness looks like. That is what deserves a physical, visceral reaction. And I saw it. I stood in it. But I did not collapse. Because the messaging, both spoken and unspoken, was clear. You are to support. You are to provide comfort. You are to be stable. You are to hold everything together. Sadness does not serve this moment. It only gets in the way.

So I made a decision, whether I realized it at the time or not. Bury the feeling. Move into action. Find resolve. Do not break, because breaking is not an option.

So now, when I search for sadness, I do not find it where I expect it to be. What I find instead is distance. Emptiness. A quiet absence of direction. Because the role I stepped into required me to postpone something essential. And what is postponed does not disappear. It waits.

What also remains is weight. My own, but also hers. I carry the heaviness of my wife's grief, the visible, undeniable pain that has every right to exist. And somewhere alongside that, something more difficult to name, the uncomfortable feeling of failure. Not logical failure, because I understand the limits of control. But something deeper than logic. Something instinctive. The sense that I should have been able to protect, to intervene, to change the outcome. That something in me was supposed to stand between life and loss and succeed.

So I don't cry. Not because there is nothing there, but because what is there does not yet know how to come forward. I did not grieve through memory. I did not grieve through shared experience. I grieve through interruption. Through responsibility. Through the collapse of a version of myself that had just begun to exist.

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