This week, we celebrated the life of my uncle, who died a little over a month after my twin, and I found myself asking a question I did not have an answer to yet: how do you grieve anew and help a parent grieve when you are still grieving yourself?

My dad is the last boy standing. He is one of six, the baby boy of three brothers and three sisters. He has now outlived every one of his brothers, which means he has arrived at that particular stage of aging where the people who knew you from the very beginning start to leave. There is nothing you can do but keep showing up to say goodbye and then keep living in the space they leave behind. He idolized his brothers, grew up sharing a bed with my uncle, and together with his sisters, they were the kind of close that only comes from a childhood spent in the same small world. Two of his sisters remain, and I am glad they have each other. His name was Nathaniel, and he served this country for 21 years, retiring as a Navy Chief Petty Officer. When they played Taps at his service, I allowed the emotion to envelop me, and it was in that moment that I began to truly understand what compounded grief feels like from the inside.

I watched my father choose to stand up and speak at his brother’s funeral, watched him walk to that podium carrying the weight of a man who had buried his son not quite two months earlier and was now burying his oldest brother. I sat in my seat holding both of those things at the same time, his loss and mine, the way you hold something fragile with both hands because one is not enough. His voice was shaky at first, and then the stories came and steadied him. I recognized that a story can carry the moment and allow those hearing it to live in the story with you. I have been learning since February that grief moves on its own schedule and without asking your permission, and the only thing you can do is pay attention to what it is showing you.

I did not want to be there. I want to be honest about that because I have been honest about everything else in these essays, and I am not going to stop now. Several times, I wanted to get up and leave, to walk out into the parking lot and just breathe air that was not weighted with flowers and loss and other people’s crying. I am emotionally tired in a way that is difficult to explain to someone who has not recently learned the geography of a loss so intimately that you recognize every landmark in the next one before you even have time to catch your breath. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from grieving back-to-back, from being asked to find your footing in a new loss when the ground beneath your first one has not yet stopped shifting.

The lesson I carried out of that service is that grief does not wait until you are finished with your own before it asks something of you. I was still very much inside my loss when I was asked to show up for someone else’s, and I showed up anyway, not because I had healed or even come close to it, but because love does not check your emotional availability before it makes a demand on you. Sometimes presence is simply not fleeing when everything in you wants to run, staying in the room because the people you love need a body beside them, someone who understands what it feels like to be in that particular chair.

My baby cousins, musicians, played an original composition they had written, and it was beautiful and moving in the way that live music made by people you love can be. I was holding myself together just fine until I thought about Touré, about how much he would have loved it, and I could see his face in my mind reacting to it the way he reacted to things that genuinely moved him, that particular expression he had, the way his whole face would shift when something reached him, and that was the moment I stopped being the one who was holding it together and became, just for a few minutes, the one who needed to be held.

That is the other thing they do not tell you about compounded grief, that it does not always announce itself with the obvious things, that sometimes it finds you in a beautiful moment, in a piece of music that has nothing to do with your own loss and everything to do with it at the same time. You cry not only for the person in the casket but for the person who is not in the room and should have been, the person who would have leaned over and whispered something to you about how good that was, something specific and funny and exactly right the way only he could be, and you would have whispered back, and that small exchange between the two of you would have been its own private moment inside a room full of mourning. That is the thing about losing a twin that I keep running into from different directions: you do not just lose the person, you lose the witness, the one who was always in the room with you, the one whose reaction to a thing became part of how you experienced the thing itself. Now that whisper is just silence, and that particular silence turns out to be very loud. It finds you in the places you least expect it. Not just in your silent times or when you are alone, but also in the middle of something achingly beautiful.

When Touré died, my cousins showed up for me in the way that people show up when they love you and do not know what else to do, and they came and stayed and did the small things that turned out to be the large things. I received all of it from the unfamiliar place of someone who had just lost the person who had known her longest. I did not know then that I was storing it, that I was learning something about what it looks like to stand beside a person who is caught inside a cycle of loss. Then my uncle died, and I found myself on the other side of that exchange, in a room full of people I love who were hurting in a way I recognized, and I understood: this is what we do, and this is what this family has always done.

I have been asking since February what a single twin does, and I think I have been finding the answer in pieces across these essays without quite letting myself say it plainly, so I will say it now. A single twin does what her brother would have done, which is show up, stay in the room, carry the memories, tell the stories, and love the people who are still here.

I am not through the grief, and I want to be honest about that because I have been honest about everything else, and I am not going to wrap this up in some tidy little neat package. But I am learning that grief and living are not opposites, that you do not finish one before you begin the other, that you carry both at the same time the way my father carried the loss of his son into the funeral of his brother and still found a way to walk to that podium and memorialize him with stories and a shaky voice that steadied itself. That is not strength in the way we usually mean it. That is just love, doing the most demanding emotional work and showing up anyway.

My aunt, who just buried her husband, lost her own twin sister a few years ago, and as I hugged her, she was the one who comforted me, which is the kind of thing that happens when you are surrounded by people who have learned grief the hard way and kept going regardless. I told her I wanted to talk with her about how she has found a way to survive being a single twin, and we have not had that conversation yet, and I do not know exactly when we will. I am still crying, still grieving, still coming apart in the middle of ordinary conversations when something catches me off guard, and I have stopped apologizing for that or trying to time it better. This is what it looks like for me right now.

In my 55 years, I have only attended one funeral that I can remember where people did not get up to the pulpit and speak platitudes about the dead. They did not tear her apart like some TV version of a dysfunctional family funeral, but there was an honesty in the room, an acknowledgment that she was tough to love, rough around the edges, and someone who did not hide what she was thinking. That kind of honesty seems rare. It makes me wonder whether it is acceptable to share only the good parts of the people we have lost, or whether that instinct is just another way we try to survive the unbearable.

I keep coming back to something I read about how grief makes us storytellers and how the stories we choose to tell reveal what we are trying to survive, and it stays with me because it explains why I feel the need to keep talking about my twin. In this time of grief, I want to tell stories about him because speaking his name feels like the only way to keep him present in a world that keeps moving without him. Part of it is the belief that people only truly die when we stop mentioning them, and part of it is the simple fact that he was the one who remembered everything, and now I am the one who has to carry all of it. I was listening to a podcast on grief when David Kessler said that their story ends, but ours continues, and that we become the memory keepers, the ones who hold what the world can no longer see, and I felt the truth of that in a way I was not prepared for. I am still learning how to be the keeper of memories that used to belong to both of us.

A few days before the funeral, several of us were sitting at his house. His wife and kids were there, and his son was telling a story about a school he had attended when the family lived somewhere for a short stretch of time. His grandfather and I remembered it differently — the name of the school was in dispute. His son stood up, then sat back down and said: I was going to text Dad to clarify. And that was it. We all got quiet for a few minutes. It wasn’t a moment full of emotion. It was full of knowing. And in that silence, I understood exactly what it meant to be the memory keeper, because I didn’t have the answer. I didn’t have what Touré would have had. The archive he carried was not one I could access, and I am still sitting with that.

What I am learning is that memories want to lead with the good parts, the good times, the moments that feel warm when everything else feels unsteady. I keep hearing that grief is love with no place to go, and as much as it hurts, it has become a kind of revelation for me. Grief and love are tied together in ways I never understood until now, and the depth of one seems to reveal the depth of the other. When you are in the middle of it, when nothing feels rational, that idea can be a small port in the storm, a reminder that the pain is connected to something real and lasting. With all of this in mind, there is no fault in reaching for the good memories first, in holding on to the moments that make you smile and letting the harder ones sit quietly in the background. We canonize the people we lose because it is what our hearts know how to do, and we build statues to the parts of them that helped us feel alive. At least that is my plan.

There are days when the responsibility feels heavier than I expected, because being the one who remembers means I am always bumping into moments that used to belong to both of us. I find myself reaching for him in small ways, wanting to confirm a detail or laugh about something only we would understand, and the silence that follows teaches me something I did not ask to learn. I am beginning to understand that carrying our memories is not only about looking back. It is also about figuring out how to move forward without abandoning the parts of myself that were shaped by being his twin. Grief is not a straight line, and it is not a task to complete. It is something that walks beside me, sometimes quietly and sometimes with a weight that makes it hard to take the next step. I do not have to pretend that I am healed or that I have found some profound lesson in all of this. I only have to keep going.

What I am also learning is that remembering someone based on the good times does not diminish the love you had for them. It does not tarnish their legacy or make the grief any less real. It can simply reflect what your heart and soul need at this particular time. There is no harm in holding on to the parts that feel gentle and familiar. There is no rule that says you must revisit every difficult moment in order to honor someone fully. Grief is not asking me to rewrite our history. It is asking me to carry it.

Sometimes he feels close in the small, ordinary ways memory shows up without warning. A song comes on, or a phrase slips out of my mouth, or I catch myself reacting to something exactly the way he would have, and I am reminded that he is woven into the fabric of who I am. I do not have to work to keep him alive in those moments. He is already there.

What I know for certain is that I will keep talking about him. I will keep saying his name and telling our stories and holding the pieces of our life that only the two of us understood. I will keep being the memory keeper because it feels like the last gift I can give him. I cannot change what happened, and I cannot bring him back, but I can make sure he is not erased by time or silence or the world’s impatience with grief.

In the end, I think this is what grief is teaching me. I do not have to rush toward meaning or pretend that I am further along than I am. I only have to keep living in a way that makes room for him and for me and for the life that continues. Remembering him is part of that life. Loving him is part of that life. And for now, that is enough.

And after all of this, I make no promises about how I will feel or react when our birthday comes around in May.

A month ago, I became something I never imagined I’d be: a single twin.

My brother Touré, my twin, my womb mate, born on the same day, into the same world, my first and longest companion, died on February 23rd. He was 55 years old. He served nearly 31 years in the United States Army, retired as a Master Sergeant, earned a Bronze Star, and kept serving as a civilian because that’s just who he was. He was a Kappa man, a legendary grillmaster (Breaker Bacon - IYKYK), a father, a husband, a son, a brother, and the kind of person who could look at a child and say, with a playful grin, “Are you safe at home?” and somehow make them laugh and feel completely seen at the same time. But before any of that, before the medals and the fraternity and the legendary grill sessions, he was my twin, and I was his.

We were inseparable from the very beginning. When we were kids, the night before our birthday, we’d share a room and sing “Tomorrow” from Annie, just the two of us, counting down to another year together. If my godmother came to pick me up, I just assumed Touré was coming too, because that’s how it always was. As adults, we didn’t always celebrate together anymore because we had our own lives and our own traditions, but he was always there, still singing Tomorrow the day before our birthday. For as long as I can remember, growing up and all through my twenties and thirties, I held onto the fact that I was the older twin, and I said it proudly, every single chance I got. Then we turned 40, and Touré looked me dead in the face and said: “You’re older.” He’d been waiting our entire lives to flip that script on me, and I have to give it to him: he played the long game, and he won.

Our birthday is coming up in May, and it will be the first one I mark alone. I keep turning the question over in my head: what does a single twin do? I rationally know I’m still a twin, that doesn’t just stop being true, but I find myself wondering if there should be a new word or phrase for the living twin of a deceased twin. Does my name need an asterisk by it now? Imani Breaker*. I know the answer, I know I’m still a twin, I know that bond doesn’t break because one of us is gone. But knowing it and feeling it are two different things, and right now the knowing doesn’t feel like enough.

Someone sent me a small book after the funeral, Grief... Reminders for Healing by Gale Massey, and one page stopped me cold: “You may be disoriented, depressed and forgetful; these things are normal with grief and will pass.” I read that and I exhaled, because that is exactly what it is. Disoriented, like reaching for my phone to text him something funny and then remembering. Forgetful, and that one cuts especially deep because Touré was my memory keeper. He remembered the people, the stories, the little details I’d long forgotten, and when I lost him, I lost an entire archive of our shared life.

A friend wrote on a card: “You will never get over this, but I pray you can get through it.” I keep coming back to that distinction, because getting over it was never the goal, and getting through it is the actual work.

Grief, I’m learning, is not one feeling but a rotation that never quite announces what’s coming next. Sadness, then numbness, then a strange burst of energy where you reorganize an entire closet at midnight for no reason at all. Then laughter, real laughter, at a memory so vivid it doesn’t even feel like the past. Then guilt for laughing. Then someone you’ve never met reaches out to tell you that your brother was bragging about you to his friends, and you break all over again because you didn’t know, and now you’ll never be able to thank him for it.

I’m an executive coach, and my work is about helping people lead with clarity, with courage, with emotional intelligence. I thought I understood what all of that meant before February 23rd, but I didn’t, not fully. And I want to be clear that none of what I’m learning is new, because you’ve probably heard most of it before, and so had I, but there are some things you can only really receive when you’re already standing in the middle of them, and grief turned out to be one of those things for me.

In the weeks since Touré’s death, it has been the smallest things that carried me. The morning of the funeral, a friend sent a text reminding me to take deep breaths, and I cannot tell you how much I needed those words at that exact moment. People from my past, people I hadn’t seen in years, showed up on the day of the service, and just seeing their faces in the room was enough to keep me standing. Close friends stepped in to do things I simply couldn’t do for myself, not because I asked but because they saw what I needed before I could name it. The people who meant the most weren’t the ones who had the perfect words. They were the ones who just came, who sat with me, who sent a meal or a quiet text that said nothing more than “I’m here.” I used to coach leaders on the importance of presence, but now I understand it in my bones in a way I never could have explained from a framework or a textbook. You don’t need a speech to help someone who is hurting, you just need to be in the room.

Since his passing, Touré’s friends have found me, people I didn’t even know, people from every chapter of his nearly 31 years in the Army, reaching out to tell me how he talked about me, how proud he was of me. I wish I’d known sooner. It’s made me think about all the people walking around carrying quiet grief, quiet pride, quiet love they haven’t spoken out loud yet, and how we wait for funerals to say the things we should be saying at dinner.

I stood up in front of a funeral full of people and talked about singing show tunes as kids, about how he’d flip my jokes back on me, about how he had these little inside jokes with everyone he ever met. There was nothing strategic about it, I just told the truth about who he was. And afterward, person after person came up to me and said the same thing: “Thank you for letting us see him.” Grief has stripped away my interest in performing strength, and I’m finding that the real thing is so much more useful.

A friend’s note said, “May God give you strength, hope, and the ability to continue to see the light in all this darkness,” and I keep holding onto that word: continue. Because the light doesn’t disappear when someone you love dies. It just moves, and part of the work of grief is learning where it went.

Touré had this gift where, even on his hardest days, you could hear him laughing and offering comfort to someone else. He made everyone feel welcome, kids especially. He’d get down on their level, look them right in the eye, and make them feel like the most important person in the world. That is leadership to me now, not a title, not a strategy, just the simple act of saying: I see you, and you matter.

I’m not through the grief, I’m still very much in it, but I’m starting to see how it’s rearranging me in ways I couldn’t have predicted. It’s making me less patient with small talk and more patient with people, less interested in being impressive and more interested in being present, less afraid of saying “I don’t know” and more committed to showing up anyway.

So if someone in your life is grieving, I’d ask you not to wait for the right words, because there are no right words. Just show up, send the text, make the call, sit in the silence if that’s all you’ve got. And if you love someone, if you’re proud of someone, if they’ve made your life better in ways big or small, tell them now. Don’t wait for a program with their photo on the front.

I’m still figuring out what a single twin does, honestly, but I have this feeling that Touré already knew the answer, waited until exactly the right moment, looked me dead in the face, and decided not to tell me, because that is just who he was, and he always did love the long game. So in the spirit of that, I want him to know that I am going back to telling everyone I am the older twin, and I would genuinely love to see him try to stop me! He played the long game and I will give him every bit of that credit, but he left, and the floor is mine now, the title is mine, and I am going to say it loudly and proudly every single chance I get because there is nobody left who can look me in the face and flip it back on me. Now I’m playing the long game.

The sun will come out tomorrow, Twin.

This is my first Substack post. I’m writing because grief is teaching me things I didn’t expect, and I think some of those lessons belong out loud. I also want to tell his stories.

If this resonated, subscribe. There will be more.