The Void

The Void: How I Learned to Live Again After Losing the Only Person Who Never Left

There's a kind of grief that doesn't look like grief. No breakdowns anyone can see. No tears in public. Just a man going through the motions of a life that looks fine on the outside while feeling completely empty on the inside. I know because I lived it. That's the void.

I was still a kid when my mother was diagnosed with ALS, and still a kid when I became her caretaker, long before I even had words for what that meant. When she passed, the loss didn't hit all at once. It hollowed me out slowly over ten years, until "fine" became a mask I wore so well I almost believed it myself.

This book is what happened after the world moved on and I was still standing in the wreckage, pretending I wasn't. It's about being a Black man in America who was never given permission to fall apart, and what it costs to hold everything together for a decade. It's about the moment I realized the person I loved most was starting to feel like a memory instead of my mother. And it's about the slow, unglamorous work of learning to feel something again.

I'm not a therapist and I'm not writing this as some expert looking in from the outside. I'm writing it as someone who lived inside the void for ten years and found his way back out, one memory at a time, until I could finally give myself permission to live again.

If you've been functioning but feeling nothing, this book was written for you.