Writing About Grief While Watching It Happen

I’m posting this blog for June early, since it is a little timely.

For the past few months, I've been working on a novella centered around grief. As a writer, that means spending a lot of time asking uncomfortable questions. What does loss actually feel like? How does it change the way someone moves through their day? What happens when the person you've lost is woven so deeply into your life that you don't know who you are without them?

Those questions live on the page. They're part of the job. This week, though, they followed me away from it.

On Wednesday, a member of an online gaming community I've been part of for years passed away. I didn't know her particularly well, but I knew her. We'd shared a space for years. We had mutual friends. She was one of those familiar presences that become part of the background of your life without you realizing how much they're woven into it.

When the news spread, the reaction was immediate. People were devastated.

Some had played alongside her for years. Some talked with her every day. Others only knew her casually. Yet across Discord channels and game chats, the grief was unmistakable. People shared stories. Memories. Screenshots. Small moments that suddenly mattered much more than they had the week before.

At the same time, one of my friends in that community has been dealing with a series of family health crises. His grandmother spent time in the hospital. His nephew suffered a severe head injury during a softball game and remains in critical condition. The uncertainty alone is exhausting.

And through all of this, I've been sitting at my desk editing my story about grief.

It has felt strange. Not because fiction and reality are the same thing. They aren't. Writing about grief doesn't prepare anyone for experiencing it. Stories can help us understand pieces of loss, but they don't shield us from it.

What struck me instead was how often grief shows up in ordinary places, not just funerals. Discord servers. Group chats. Hospital waiting rooms. The quiet pause before someone types a message they don't want to send. The moment a community realizes one of its members won't be logging in again.

For a long time, people treated online friendships as somehow less real than friendships formed in person. I don't think that's true. Maybe it never was. When you've spent years talking with someone, sharing hobbies, celebrating victories, complaining about bad days, hearing about their family, and watching their life unfold in real time, the relationship is real. The distance doesn't change that. Neither does the medium. The grief is real, too.

One of our mutual friends said it well: “My heart is broken. I feel so sad. It’s irrational and I know it. But she was good people who [is] gone too soon and it hurts to know I can’t say goodbye. You know when people here are real and we are not pixels even tho we play a game together. And your feelings get hurt despite the fact that people say it’s “just a game”… it not just a fkn game… it’s connection… we play to connect and we play a lot… so it is more than just a game. We are connected by more than just the game.”

One of the things I've learned while writing this novella is that grief isn't only about death. Sometimes it's about illness. Sometimes it's about uncertainty. Sometimes it's about the fear of losing someone. Sometimes it's about trying to imagine a future that suddenly looks different than the one you expected.

And sometimes it's about a community trying to absorb an absence.

I've spent months trying to write honestly about loss. This week has been a reminder that loss is everywhere—not constantly, not overwhelmingly, but quietly woven into the lives of people around us.

The stories we tell don't come from nowhere, they come from watching people carry impossible things, they come from trying to understand how we carry them ourselves, and sometimes, if we're lucky, they remind us to be a little gentler with each other while we're doing it.

Signed from the spaces between stories, where connections linger long after the conversation ends,

S.G., Keeper of the Wondrous Ledger