Late in her life, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross said something quietly radical: grief is not a staircase you descend step by step. It isn’t neat. It doesn’t behave. It doesn’t move in order.
Grief is a pile of feelings you trip over sometimes decades later when you least expect it.
This photo, circa 1985, is the day we left Long Island.
Those weren’t my sisters standing there. They were my sister Julie’s people. Her girls. Her chosen ecosystem. For them, that day felt like the end of the world.
And in a way, it was.
Childhood worlds don’t announce their ending. They don’t give you time to prepare. They just… stop.
Julie was born an extrovert. My mother used to say that the moment Julie learned how to walk, she was already halfway out the door. Friends were oxygen. Connection was instinct. People were always her compass.
So the move wasn’t just a relocation.
It was a rupture.
We weren’t just leaving Long Island, we were trading one universe for another.
We were moving to Woodstock, New York.
Out of a dense, humming suburb of New York City, full of sidewalks, schools, neighbors, momentum, and into a place that felt suspended in time. Penny socials. Quilting bees. Quiet roads. A town still hollowed out after IBM left, leaving behind economic scars that no one dressed up or renamed.
It was a ghost town in recovery.
At the same time, my father’s business was transitioning. The certainty we had known, the rhythm of work, stability, predictability, was shifting under our feet. Nothing catastrophic. Nothing dramatic. But everything felt… unsettled. Adults were adjusting. Kids absorbed it without language.
We were latchkey kids. Independent by necessity. Resilient without knowing we were being trained.
That era, our era, was loud with promise. Bon Jovi on repeat. Living on a prayer. Youth Gone Wild. Every lyric swore permanence. Forever friendships. Forever love. Forever belonging.
We believed it.
What we didn’t understand yet was that some endings are quiet. They don’t feel tragic until later, when you realize something never came back.
That photograph holds grief, transition, and loss all at once. Not the loss of a person—but the loss of a season, an identity, a way of moving through the world.
And yet, here’s the paradox.
Autumn in Woodstock was something close to holy.
The first time the leaves turned, it felt like God had come down and brushed the mountains by hand. Gold. Fire. Stillness. A beauty so complete it almost demanded reverence. It was stunning. Overwhelming. Restorative in ways we didn’t yet understand.
Loss and beauty arrived together.
That’s something life keeps doing.
We did upstate. Life went on. But Julie made a quiet vow, to herself, to Long Island, to those girls in that photograph.
And she kept it.
She stayed connected. She nurtured those relationships across decades. They became her framily in every sense of the word. Truth be told, they probably hold more shared memories with her than I do.
Family often gets the hard stuff, the endurance, the obligation, the messiness. Friends, the real ones, are often built on laughter. On chosen joy. On memories that don’t carry the same weight of responsibility.
They are the people who tether you when you start drifting emotionally out of orbit.
Those girls grew up. Built lives. Created families and networks of their own. But they never let go of that 1985 thread. There is a richness in those years that never depreciates.
Every day was adventure. Goofiness. Freedom without foresight.
Years later, after more than two decades working in senior care, I realized how early the lesson had arrived.
A man who ran a home-modification business once said something that stayed with me:
“Older adults aren’t just cranky. They’re grieving. Constantly.”
They’re grieving people, but also roles, independence, identity, stability.
Aging requires resilience most people never train for.
Julie and I are opposites that way. People energize her; people eventually drain me. Both truths can coexist. Knowing yourself matters. So does noticing who’s around you, because as the years pass, people do start falling away. Some to distance. Some to distraction. Some to death.
Social media didn’t help. Neither did the illusion that knowing more people meant deeper connection.
Those girls in the picture represent continuity. A bond formed before the world sped up. Before attention fractured. Before care got complicated. Before aging parents. Before grief became a regular visitor.
They remind me that some connections are forged before the shifts, and survive them.
Hold on, soul sisters.
We’re going to need the resilience you planted back then. We’re going to need each other as we help our families through the next decade of aging, loss, and transition.
Let’s stay together
whether times are good or bad,
happy or sad.
Some seasons end.
Some landscapes change everything.
And some bonds, thank God, hold.
