You Can’t Be Sad in a Panda Hat
Eight Years: Living With What Remains
He wore the hat with a kind of quiet mischief that did not leave him, even then.
There are days when grief feels like something you might believe people expect you to manage quietly.
To keep it contained.
To not disturb the room.
Most of us learn how to do that.
We say the right things.
We accept the condolences.
We move the conversation along.
But grief does not stay contained just because we’ve learned how to behave around it.
I am writing this a day late.
That wasn’t the plan, though part of me can see that I hoped the date might pass if I didn’t meet it directly.
It didn’t.
It arrived anyway.
Just without my cooperation yesterday.
Eight years since Darryl died.
And still, something in me looks for a way to step around the weight of that day.
This year carries more than the anniversary.
My sister died in December of 2024.
That absence is still close.
Still moving through me in ways that don’t follow sequence or reason.
And when I stop long enough to count the people I have known and loved since 2018 who are no longer here in the way they once were,
the number gathers quickly.
Twelve.
Twelve lives that have moved out of the visible arrangement.
And alongside those deaths, there have been other endings that do not get named in the same way.
Friendships that did not survive.
Connections that unravelled, even with an effort to keep them intact.
Endings with no funeral, no ritual, no shared language around them.
Only the quiet fact that someone who once lived inside the fabric of your life no longer does in the same way.
I hesitate with the word “loss.”
It doesn't land cleanly for me.
Nothing has been misplaced.
No one has wandered off beyond reach.
The form of the relationship changes.
The way of meeting changes.
But something of it continues.
Even if only in ways that don’t answer when called.
I have felt these endings in the body as well.
They carry their own shape.
Their own weight.
I cannot say with certainty what shapes this.
Whether it belongs to this stage of life, where patterns leave little room for elasticity and movement.
Or whether it reflects something larger in the times we are living through.
What I do know is this:
In recent years, in my own life and in the lives of many people I have worked with, I have witnessed more long-standing relationships reach a point where they could no longer continue as they were.
Even where there was care.
Even where there was history.
Some things fray slowly.
Some come apart all at once.
They leave their mark either way.
You can’t be sad in a panda hat.
During Darryl’s brief illness, he began writing a brave blog about his Cancer journey, which he called The Last Post. If you dare read it, scroll to the beginning, not the end.
A series of letters, not knowing which one would be the final one.
He also wrote love letters to those closest to him.
It was his way of staying in contact with the sobering fact that he was leaving.
Somewhere in that time, he told me he wanted a panda hat.
There was no point to it.
When someone you love asks for something like that, in the middle of everything that was happening, you go and find it.
So I did.
We took photos.
He wore the hat with a kind of quiet mischief that did not leave him, even then.
And he said,
“You can’t be sad in a panda hat.”
It didn’t change what was coming.
It didn’t settle anything.
It made a small opening.
Enough for a breath.
Eight years since he took his last breath…
And the structure of my life shifted in ways that did not ask permission.
I remember thinking, early on, that grief, the bowling ball-sized hole in my chest, would take the whole field.
It didn’t.
It moved in and stayed.
And over time, I learned how to live with it present.
Now it sits inside ordinary days.
Morning coffee.
Work.
Small routines that continue whether or not I feel ready.
I go on.
Because that is what living requires.
And I carry him with me.
Not in a way that can be explained cleanly.
More like a steady presence that moves through the background of things.
In the car.
In the quiet moments.
In the decisions that used to be shared out loud.
There are times when I can feel him tracking alongside me.
Not as memory alone.
Something closer than that.
The absence holds.
And something else moves alongside it.
The mind does what it can with this.
It tries to place it somewhere that makes sense.
It doesn't quite manage.
There are moments when something lands in me that feels unmistakable.
A warmth.
A thought that arrives without effort.
A shift in the room that I do not try to explain.
It does not remove the longing.
It changes how it sits in me.
Memory shifts.
Not all at once.
Not in ways I can track.
But it does not take the core of it with it.
Love does not seem to loosen its hold.
Grief does not either.
They settle deeper.
They become part of how the body holds experience.
Less visible.
More constant.
This anniversary carries more than the others.
My sister’s death in December 2024.
Still too close.
Still moving through me in its own way.
When I stop long enough to count the people I have known and loved who have died since 2018,
the number gathers quietly.
Twelve.
It feels like a threshold of this stage of life.
More witnessing.
More leave-taking.
Grief does not let you look away.
There is something humbling in continuing.
Not in a grand way.
In the practical sense of getting up and meeting the day as it is.
The ones who have died do not need us to stop living.
That is clear to me.
If anything, there is a kind of expectation in it.
That we stay here and use the time we have.
If I listen carefully, I can still hear Darryl’s voice in that.
Direct.
A little too dry.
Cutting through whatever has built up.
“It’s over.
You’re still here.
Don’t waste it.”
The fact of it lands clean.
It is over.
And I am still here.
Did you ever notice that some herbal teas quietly offer reflective, timely messages? This was mine yesterday. Little nudges from ‘the field’ are never random.
So I don’t waste it.
Not completely.
Not perfectly.
I make a life where I can, with those who remain.
Out of what remains.
Out of what has been broken open and reshaped over time.
There is still joy.
There is still love.
There are still moments that arrive with a kind of fullness I did not expect.
The grief stays.
It moves differently now.
Like a current that runs under everything.
The music of it continues.
It always has.
I have learned how to hear it
without needing it to stop.
Outro
If you are living with grief in your own way and finding it difficult to sit with what it asks of you,
I have come to understand this terrain through lived experience and years of sitting with others at its edge.
There is a way for grief to exist alongside a life, without being pushed away or made into something it is not.
If it would feel supportive to have a place to land, you’re welcome to reach out.
