Seven years is supposed to feel like distance. That’s what people tell you, what you tell yourself, what the world quietly expects you to accept. Time moves forward, relentlessly, stacking days into months into years until something that once felt immediate is supposed to settle into memory. But grief doesn’t follow that rule. It doesn’t respect calendars or anniversaries. It doesn’t care how many years have passed. Sometimes seven years feels like a lifetime ago, like you’ve lived entire versions of yourself since then. And sometimes it feels like nothing has moved at all, like you’re still standing in that exact moment when everything changed. Both of those realities exist at once, overlapping, impossible to separate, and somehow that contradiction becomes its own kind of truth.
Today is April 18, 2026, and it has been seven years since my uncle died. Even writing that feels strange, like I’m describing something distant when it doesn’t feel distant at all. It feels close. Too close. There are moments where I stop and think about it, and it genuinely doesn’t feel like seven years have passed. It feels like a few months, maybe a year at most, like something recent enough that I should still be able to reach out, still be able to hear his voice, still be able to exist in a world where he’s here. And then there are other moments where the weight of those seven years hits all at once, where I realize how much time has actually gone by without him, how many things have happened, how many moments he’s missed, how much life has continued in a way that feels both natural and deeply wrong at the same time.
What makes it even harder to process is how I found out. There was no call. No moment of someone sitting me down, no gradual realization, no buffer between normal life and the shock of loss. It was a social media post. Just words on a screen from a family member who knew him. That’s how I learned that someone who meant that much to me was gone. And at first, it didn’t even feel real. It couldn’t be real. It felt like a mistake, like some kind of misunderstanding, like maybe it was about someone else with the same name. There was that immediate instinct to reject it, to push it away, to think, “What is this? This has to be a joke.” Because the alternative was too heavy, too sudden, too final to accept in that moment.
But it wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t a joke. It was real. And that realization didn’t come gently. It hit hard, all at once, like the ground giving out underneath you before you even realize you’ve lost your footing. That moment sticks in a way that doesn’t fade. It replays itself, not always vividly, but always there, like a fixed point in time that everything else moves around. The way something like that enters your life matters. The way you learn about a loss becomes part of the loss itself, stitched into the memory in a way you can’t separate. And finding out like that, through a screen, alone with the information before anyone could even explain it, made it feel even more unreal and more devastating at the same time.
And then there’s how it happened. Not just that he died, but the way it unfolded. A few days before, he bumped his head. Something that sounds small, something that on its own wouldn’t raise alarms. The kind of thing people brush off, maybe joke about, maybe forget entirely. And then a few days later, everything changed. He collapsed. He fell into a coma. And he never woke up. That sequence of events doesn’t sit right, even years later. It feels abrupt, unfair, like something that shouldn’t have been able to escalate like that. It leaves behind questions that don’t have satisfying answers, a sense that something so massive came from something that seemed so minor, and that disconnect makes it even harder to fully accept.
It was awful. There’s no softer way to put it, no way to wrap it in language that makes it easier to hold. It was traumatic. It reshaped something fundamental in how I understand how quickly life can change, how fragile everything actually is. One moment someone is there, part of your everyday world, someone you assume will continue to be there in all the ways that matter. And then, in what feels like no time at all, they’re gone. Not gradually, not in a way that gives you time to prepare, but suddenly, in a way that leaves you trying to catch up to something that’s already happened.
And what makes this loss even heavier is who he was to me. He wasn’t just an uncle in the distant, occasional sense of the word. He was like a dad to me. Truly. That kind of relationship doesn’t fit neatly into labels. It goes beyond titles and definitions. It’s built on presence, on the role someone plays in your life, on the way they show up for you, guide you, support you, exist as a steady figure in your world. Losing him wasn’t just losing a relative. It was losing someone who filled a space that can’t really be replaced, someone whose absence is felt in ways that extend into so many parts of life.
That’s part of why time doesn’t “fix” it in the way people sometimes suggest it will. You don’t move on from something like that. You move with it. It becomes part of how you experience the world, part of how you think, part of how you measure time itself. Anniversaries like this one don’t just mark the passing of years. They bring everything back to the surface, not necessarily in a way that overwhelms you completely, but in a way that reminds you that the loss is still there, still real, still significant. It doesn’t disappear just because more time has passed.
There’s also something surreal about the way memories work after this kind of loss. They don’t line up neatly in the past. They feel present, like they exist alongside your current life rather than behind it. You can think about a moment, a conversation, a feeling, and it doesn’t feel like something that happened “back then.” It feels immediate, like something you can almost step back into. And then you’re hit with the reality that you can’t. That contrast between how close it feels and how final it actually is creates a kind of emotional dissonance that’s hard to fully put into words.
Every fucking April since 2019 has felt like it comes with its own kind of weight, like the month itself is cursed or stacked against me in ways that don’t even feel rational anymore. It’s not just one thing. It’s not just one bad memory or one hard moment that defines it. It’s the accumulation of everything that keeps happening in or around this month, year after year, like April refuses to let anything be normal. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even approach April with neutrality anymore. There’s always this low-level expectation that something is going to go wrong, or something is going to resurface, or something is going to remind me why this stretch of time has felt so consistently heavy since 2019.
April 2019 was already close to something foundational breaking. My uncle on my dad’s side died, and that alone changed the emotional baseline of everything that came after. That loss never really “settled” in the way people expect grief to settle. It just became part of everything else. And even now, years later, it still feels close in a way that doesn’t make sense on paper. Time has passed, but the emotional distance never matched it. That’s part of why April itself started to feel different after that point. It wasn’t just a month anymore. It was a reminder.
Then came April 2020, and it felt like the world itself was collapsing in layers. It was only a month after my grandpa died, so I was already in that raw, disoriented state where everything feels slightly unreal. And then COVID started spreading everywhere, and the entire atmosphere of life changed overnight. Fear, uncertainty, isolation, all of it just layered on top of grief that hadn’t even had time to breathe yet. And then, on top of that, my high school history teacher died from COVID. What makes that even more surreal is that he died on the exact same day, one year after my uncle died. That kind of timing feels almost impossible when you look at it from the outside, like some kind of cruel coincidence that repeats the same emotional wound on a calendar you didn’t ask to be part of.
That teacher wasn’t just a name on a roster either. He was someone who actually made learning feel alive in a way that stuck with me. And then suddenly he was gone too, in the middle of a global crisis that already felt like it was stripping everything familiar away. And that year, politically and socially, everything felt unstable in a different way as well. Trump’s first term response to COVID was chaotic and inconsistent, and the broader environment in the country felt like it was constantly spiraling between denial, panic, and confusion. It wasn’t just personal grief anymore. It felt like the entire structure of reality was shaky.
April 2021 didn’t give any real relief either. It was only a few months after the Capitol riots, and the political tension in the country still felt thick in a way that was hard to ignore. Everything felt polarized, loud, and unstable. Even day-to-day life carried this underlying sense of friction, like everyone was still reacting to something unresolved. Around that same time, I also got canned from what I considered my dream job back then. That wasn’t just a professional setback. It hit in a way that made everything feel more uncertain, like stability itself was something I couldn’t rely on, even when I thought I had it.
April 2022 brought its own different kind of heaviness. The Ukraine war had just started a couple months earlier, and the global atmosphere felt tense and uncertain in a way that was hard to fully process in the background of everyday life. But there was also something more personal underneath that I didn’t fully understand at the time. I had a friend I had fallen out with, and I didn’t know it then, but he died in 2022. I only found out much later, over two years after the fact, in May 2024. That delay adds its own kind of distortion to the memory, because it means the grief doesn’t happen where it “should” in time. It arrives late, retroactively, and rewrites what you thought you already understood about the past.
April 2023 felt like another shift into something more chaotic in a different way. The indictment of Donald Trump made New York feel tense in a very immediate, physical sense. The city itself felt like it was on edge, like every conversation carried an undertone of political friction and uncertainty. It wasn’t just headlines anymore. It was something that felt embedded in the environment, like walking through the city itself came with a sense of instability that you could feel in the air.
Then April 2024 came, and the Trump trial made everything feel even more intense. New York felt even more chaotic, even more charged, like there was a constant pressure in the background of daily life. That month was also still emotionally shaped by loss on a personal level, because a few months earlier, my dog of 13 years had died in the summer of 2023. That kind of loss doesn’t just disappear by the time a new calendar year rolls around. It stays embedded in routines, in spaces, in quiet moments that don’t have anything to do with politics or headlines but still carry that absence with them.
April 2025 didn’t reset anything either. It came only a few months after my other dog, who I had for almost 10 years, got sick with cancer in late 2024, then died just a few weeks later in January 2025, right before her 10th birthday in February. That loss felt especially cruel in its timing, like there wasn’t even enough space between sickness and goodbye for it to fully register. And by the time April came around again, I was still sitting in that aftermath. On top of that, it was a few months into Trump’s second term, and after the 2024 election, everything politically felt heightened again. His campaign and return to office felt even more intense and divisive than before, and the sense of national instability didn’t really feel like it had eased at all. It felt like everything was still accelerating instead of calming down.
Now April 2026 is here, and it somehow feels like it’s carrying all of that history with it at once. It doesn’t feel separate from the previous Aprils. It feels like an extension of them. A continuation. The political situation has escalated in ways that feel almost unreal when you say them out loud. The United States has been involved in escalating military action abroad, including direct conflict with Iran that has stretched into a prolonged war environment. There have been naval blockades, global economic instability, and rising tensions that feel like they are constantly shifting. At the same time, there has been renewed military intervention and pressure in places like Venezuela, along with ongoing rhetoric about expanding conflict or influence into other regions, including Greenland and even Cuba. It feels like the geopolitical atmosphere is constantly moving between escalation and instability, with no clear sense of de-escalation in sight.
Reading or hearing things like that on the news doesn’t feel distant anymore. It feels immediate, like the world itself is stuck in a constant state of volatility. Oil markets shifting, military movements, diplomatic breakdowns, threats of expansion, ceasefires collapsing or being questioned almost immediately afterward. Everything feels like it’s happening all at once, without enough time for anything to stabilize before the next development hits. And it all layers on top of the personal history of these Aprils, making the present feel even heavier because it’s not just about what’s happening now. It’s about everything that has already happened before.
That’s what makes this stretch of time feel so strange to live through. It’s not that every single April is objectively the worst thing imaginable. It’s that each one stacks on top of the last, so the emotional weight compounds instead of resets. Grief, political tension, personal loss, instability, change, all of it keeps returning in different forms, but always around the same time of year. And eventually, you start to associate the month itself with that accumulation, even when you logically know it’s just a marker on a calendar.
It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t lived through that kind of repeating pattern how much it changes your relationship with time. April stops feeling like just another month. It becomes a reminder of everything that has already happened and everything that could still happen again. And even when nothing specific is going wrong in the moment, there’s still that background awareness that history has not exactly been kind to this stretch of time.
So every April since 2019 doesn’t feel like a series of isolated events. It feels like one long continuation of everything that started back then. A chain of loss, instability, change, and global uncertainty that never fully resets before the next link is added. And at some point, you stop thinking of it as coincidence and start thinking of it as a pattern you just have to live through.
Seven years later, that surreal feeling hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s become part of the way I understand the loss. Time has moved forward, undeniably. Life has continued, as it always does. But there’s a part of me that is still in that moment of discovery, still processing the shock, still trying to reconcile how something so significant could happen so suddenly and so quietly from my perspective. That moment didn’t stay in the past. It stretched forward, threading itself through the years that followed.
And maybe that’s what grief really is in situations like this. Not something that fades into nothing, but something that changes shape over time. It becomes less about the immediate shock and more about the ongoing absence. Less about the moment you found out and more about all the moments since then where you feel that absence in different ways. The big moments, the small ones, the ordinary days where something reminds you of them out of nowhere. It’s not constant in the same way, but it’s persistent. It stays.
Seven years later, it still feels surreal. It still feels unfair. It still feels like something that shouldn’t have happened the way it did. And it still feels like I lost someone who meant more to me than words can fully capture. Time has passed, but that doesn’t erase the reality of what was lost or the impact it continues to have. It just adds layers to it, layers of memory, reflection, and the ongoing process of carrying something that never really goes away.
And maybe that’s the closest thing to understanding it. Not trying to force it into something neat or resolved, but recognizing that it exists in that in-between space where time moves forward and stands still at the same time. Where the past feels present, and the present is shaped by something that happened years ago. Where seven years can feel like everything and nothing all at once.
