On Grief, and All the Feelings That Don't Have Words

I lost a friend recently.

We went to high school together, back in CNN, Hanoi. He was one of those people who just made you feel like you were being looked after. Very điềm tĩnh, chân thành, nhẹ nhàng. Steady. Sincere. Gentle in a way that you only fully appreciate when it's no longer there.

I had heard about his condition a few months ago from another friend. And I think part of me tucked that information somewhere far away, the way you do when something is too heavy to hold in your hands all the time. The way that optimism and denial work together to mask it. I kept living. And then that Monday, I couldn't keep it tucked away anymore.

There's a word in Vietnamese: hụt hẫng. I don't know if English has an equivalent. It's that moment when your heart skips, and then you feel shock so deep that your soul seems to leave your body for just a second, and when it comes back, there's this hollow, quiet emptiness waiting for you. That's what it felt like.

And then I cried. A lot. In the office, at home, in the car, on the bed, at my desk, on the phone.

I cried because I feel sad and tiếc for him. Tiếc is another one of those words I struggle to translate. It's somewhere between sadness and longing and the ache of things left unfinished, of time that deserved more. I feel tiếc that we didn't have more time. I feel tiếc for all the conversations we'll never get to have. I feel tiếc that kind people like him should have more time in life. And it goes on and on.

I went looking for photos of us. The last one I could find was from a visit back to Vietnam, years ago. A group of us, friends from Finland, Germany, Canada, and from town, all together, young and naive, laughing at everything and nothing. We hugged. We chatted nonsense. We smiled at the camera with our whole chests. We had no idea that would be the last time we were all together with him in person. You never do.

· · ·

I keep thinking about the night we saw him off at the airport when he left to study in the US. We threw a party at his house first, nằm lăn lê bò toài on the floor, singing, laughing, crying. And then at the airport, we watched him and his partner say farewell to each other, and I think all of us silently wished and hoped that one day they would find their way back to each other and build something beautiful.

They did. Against distance, time, and all the drama and complexity of being young and in love, they found each other again. They built a family. And now, reading his mom's post, his colleagues' words, his wife's messages, seeing how many people he touched, I think about that and feel such a deep and complicated love for the life he lived.

In the taxi home from the airport that night, we were quiet for a while. Heavy-hearted and tired. And then someone said let's go back to Nhà Trung, meaning Trung's house, and the driver heard Nhà Chung, a completely different street, and took us the wrong way. We laughed so hard. That's the kind of memory that you keep forever, not because it means anything big, but because it's just him, adjacent to it, and it makes the whole thing feel warm.

· · ·

Grief is messy. It doesn't move in a straight line. It doesn't follow a schedule or arrive neatly in stages. What I've been sitting with is this combination of sadness, emptiness, nostalgia, regret, worry, and devastation, all moving alongside love, gratitude, and togetherness. All of it at once. Sometimes in the same breath.

I cried with Tony. I cried with friends. I learned to let myself sit with it instead of pushing it somewhere quiet like the way I used to do.

And slowly, something shifted in how I was seeing it. I had this image in my head of my stella canvas, this sky full of connections, all of us dots of light connected to each other. I thought that losing him meant one of those lights was dimming and disappearing. But that's not what happened. His light didn't just go out. It strengthened every other connection around it. It reminded us to reach out. It gave us reason to check in, to say I love you, to hold each other a little longer. The connections between the rest of us got brighter because of him.

That's his power. That's his impact.

Like his partner said on her post, he's no longer here physically, but he's still present in the way he lived. The way his passing reminds us to care for each other, to take care of our health, to share love, to find moments of peace even inside all this grief. Sự nhiệt tình, hết lòng in everything he did. That doesn't disappear. That's the way he lived his rực rỡ life. And it echoes.

· · ·

I'm sharing this here because I want to remember it, and because I hope it reaches someone who needs it.

It's okay to not be okay.

We're all human. We have feelings, all of them, the ones with English words, Vietnamese words, and the ones without any. And there's a healthy, kind, gentle way to process it, to sit with it, to watch it move through you without running away from it.

If you look closely, even in grief, there is love. Sometimes the grief is the love, just transformed into something heavier for a while. The beauty is that it doesn't stay heavy forever. We can share it with others, with compassion, with our whole heart. In Vietnamese we call it chia buồn, we share the sadness, the grief together, cho vơi đi nỗi buồn đau, so that the sadness feels less heavy because we have each other.

So today, if you need to cry, go cry. Find someone to cry with, or cry alone, or put on a song and just let it come. Watch it arrive and watch it pass. And I hope in between, you find support, warmth, and peace. I hope you find the strength to keep life-ing, to keep showing up, to keep experiencing this wild, tender, beautiful journey we've all been given.

With so much love to everyone I've met in this life.

To my friend: thank you for the memories, the warmth, and the light you left behind. We carry you with us.

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Disclaimer: Written with Claude as a thought partner to help organize my messy thoughts and ideas, and structure them in a way that feels more digestible for readers. The original thoughts, experiences, and perspective are entirely my own.

Photo from Lummi

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