Distance Is Not the Same as Absence

Someone in my family is dying.

I’m not going to walk you through the details because that’s not what this is about. What I will tell you is that I am far away, the people who can show up are showing up, and I am doing the thing where you watch from a distance and feel completely useless.

There is a specific kind of grief that comes with being the one who is far.

Not absent. Definitely not checked out. Not someone who stopped caring or let the relationship go cold.

Just far.

Geographically, logistically, structurally far. You built a life somewhere else. The life is real and good and yours. And then something happens back where you came from and suddenly the distance you rarely stressed about becomes the thing you cannot stop thinking about.

We talk about showing up as if it’s a moral category. The people who are there are good. They’re present, devoted, doing the work. And the people who aren’t there — well. The silence around that is loud enough.

But some of us are just far. Not by accident. Not because we love less. Because life moved us, or we moved ourselves, and now there is a crisis happening somewhere we cannot easily get to and we are doing the grief thing through a phone screen.

Calling more than usual. Sending money when we can. Checking in constantly and somehow still feeling like none of it is enough.

It is never enough when someone you love is in pain and you are not in the room.

I’ve been sitting with that this week.

The gap between what I feel and what I’m able to do. The guilt that doesn’t care about logistics.

I don’t think we talk honestly about the weight of loving people from a distance when things get hard. We talk about grief. We talk about presence but not really about the ones who are far and doing their best with what they have.

So if that’s you right now, watching something hard from somewhere else, wishing you could do more, feeling the distance in a way that aches — I just want to say:

The love is real even when the presence is limited.

Distance is not the same as absence.

I’m still working on believing that myself.