The Sky Doesn't Warn You
On grief that goes off like fireworks, and the love that keeps lighting the fuse.
“Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”
~ Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
You were going about your day, in the grocery store line, at a red light, at the edge of someone else’s celebration, or preparing for a holiday gathering. It’s not that you aren’t often thinking about or grieving your sibling, but sometimes something catches you and the grief surges. Perhaps, a cereal box, a song, a laugh, or a smell stirred the grief up in your chest or your eyes before you could brace for it.
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If it has been months, or years, the people around you probably assume the show ended a long time ago. Some days you assume it, too. Then an ordinary evening changes, and you find yourself crying in a parked car or feeling a heaviness you had forgotten could feel so real over a commercial, a ballgame, a stranger’s voice, or seemingly nothing at all.
You begin to wonder what is wrong with you. I am here to let you know nothing is wrong with you.
There is a name for this. The grief researcher Dr. Therese Rando calls these moments “subsequent temporary upsurges of grief,” or STUGs, for short. Yesterday, I called them what they feel like: fireworks.
A firework is quiet until it isn’t. As an onlooker, you cannot see the fuse from where you stand. The flash and beauty come first. The boom arrives later, followed by the tears of children, the barking of dogs, and the echo felt in your chest. Then it is over.
The way your body reacts to a grief trigger before your mind understands what lit it is much like the experience of STUGs.
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Temporary is a word Rando chose on purpose. The burst fades. The smoke drifts. The sky goes back to being the sky. What stays is the memory of the image, maybe even a photo or video of it, long after you look away.
A sibling runs through the ordinary parts of a life: the kitchen, the backseat, the inside jokes, the arguments over the remote, the roles in the family. That is why almost anything can serve as a fuse. Every week, somewhere in the world, fireworks go up for a national holiday, a festival, a wedding, or a new year. Every day, your own life moves through those same ordinary parts. The dark sky between bursts is not absence. It is loaded.
A surge like this is not a malfunction. It rises because the bond with your sibling is still alive, and something ordinary reminded your body of them before your mind could explain it. People who have never lost a sibling, or anyone significant, might call that a breakdown. I would call it a light, the kind you can still see them by.
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This weekend was Independence Day here in the United States, and I did not celebrate it for a multitude of reasons. I did not host or attend a cookout, and I did not go to a parade.
When we were kids, our dad would often drive our family of four to the fireworks. Tony and I were in the back of the car, which Dad strategically parked so we could avoid too much traffic on the way home. As we got older, Tony and I marched in parades on the holiday for many years, and later in the day we went to the fireworks. By the time we were older teens and young adults, we sometimes skipped the crowds altogether and watched the fireworks on television.
This year I stayed home, and the fireworks of grief came to me anyway. I was sharing memories of holidays past with my husband when we heard fireworks nearby, just after a severe thunderstorm. Soon thereafter, the flash of memory put me in the backseat of our dad’s car with Tony, the whole night ahead of us: me anxious, Tony beaming with joy in his beautiful smile.
The boom came late, the way it does. As the memory faded, the afterimage it left was Tony, and the lingering smoke was the heaviness of having grieved him for nearly six and a half years.
I have stopped asking the sky to stay dark.
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If any of this landed, write on this:
Think of the last time grief went off in you without warning. What was the flash, what was the boom, and what image stayed with you once the sky cleared?
Take whatever time you need. No editing, no judgment. Just let it come.
The full Wild Grief Prompt Set for this theme arrives tomorrow, twelve prompts that move from the burst itself toward the bond that keeps lighting the fuse. The first section is open to everyone. The rest is for paid subscribers.
Thanks for reading Wild Grief. If this reached you, send it to someone who might need it, or hold onto it for yourself. Both matter.
Warmly,
Angela
Tony’s little sister 🐺
🎧 The Broken Pack: Stories of Sibling Loss is available wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Wild Grief is written by Dr. Angela Dean, PsyD, FT, GTMR (psychologist, thanatologist, and Tony’s surviving sibling). Interactions with The Broken Pack, LLC, Dr. Angela Dean, and its content do not constitute a therapeutic or professional psychological relationship with Dr. Dean. All content is educational and informational, not clinical advice. If you or someone you know is in crisis, please reach out to your local crisis line or warm line, or visit findahelpline.com.
Wild Grief is original work by Dr. Angela Dean and is protected by copyright. You are welcome to share posts via link. Please do not copy, reproduce, or republish content elsewhere without written permission. Certain Broken Pack resources, including A Surviving Sibling’s Bill of Rights, are separately released under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and may be shared in full, with attribution, for non-commercial use. Those resources will say so explicitly.
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This is gorgeous, Angela.