Alright, you beautiful, tear-streaked, probably-just-punched-a-wall warriors. Let’s get into a specific kind of agony that grief, in its infinite capacity for cruel fucking irony, likes to serve up cold. It’s not just the silence, the emptiness, the relentless ache of their absence – though those bastards are always front and fucking center. No. This is about something more specific, something that adds a layer of infuriating, almost unbearable longing to the already existing shitshow.
This is about missing their twisted sense of humor. Especially when you’re in the throes of a full-blown, five-alarm, snot-bubble, why-is-the-world-still-spinning, ugly-cry, the-world-is-ending, my-soul-is-imploding kind of grief meltdown.
If your person was anything like my Patrick – a magnificent bastard who could find the absolute batshit craziness in Armageddon and wouldn’t hesitate to point it out with a sarcastic grin while the meteors rained down – then you know exactly what the hell I’m talking about.
If he were here right now, watching me dissolve into a puddle of incoherent despair over a goddamn improperly loaded dishwasher, Patrick would be laughing his magnificent asshole off.
And that, my friends, is a special kind of hell. And a special kind of love.
You know what I’m talking about if you were lucky enough – or cursed enough, depending on the day – to love someone whose humor was sharper than a goddamn razor, whose wit was drier than the Sahara, whose primary response to chaos, tragedy, or even just a mildly inconvenient Tuesday was a well-aimed, often inappropriate, but always brilliantly timed sarcastic remark.
These weren't the gentle souls who offered comforting hugs and whispered platitudes. These were the lovable pricks who’d see you sobbing over burnt toast and ask if you were planning on entering it into a modern art exhibition titled "Despair in Carbohydrate Form." The ones who, if you tripped and fell flat on your face, would wait until they were sure you weren’t concussed before asking if the pavement was okay. The ones whose love language often involved a healthy dose of good-natured (or sometimes just natured) mockery.
And goddamn it, you loved that about them. You loved that they didn’t treat you like a fragile fucking porcelain doll. You loved that they could find the craziness in the agony. You loved that their twisted humor was a lifeline, a shared secret language, a way of saying "I see your pain, and it’s fucking awful, but also, did you see the ridiculous hat that pigeon is wearing?"
Patrick was the fuckin' king of this. He had it down to a goddamn art form. My beautiful, loud, chaos-loving, often infuriating, always brutally honest anchor. If I was neck-deep in a spiral of anxiety, convinced the sky was falling and we were all doomed, he wouldn’t try to reason me out of it with gentle logic. He’d hit me with something so off-the-wall, so unexpected, so darkly hilarious, it would derail my panic train completely. He’d look at me with that glint in his piercing blue eyes – the one that saw every ounce of my bullshit and loved me anyway–and deliver a line that would make a seasoned comedian weep with envy.
And now? Now, when I’m actually living through a genuine, no-bullshit, soul-annihilating catastrophe, when the grief is a monstrous tidal wave threatening to drown me, when I’m having a full-blown meltdown because the goddamn grocery store is out of his favorite brand of coffee and it feels like the final, definitive fucking nail in the coffin of my existence… his absence, and the absence of that specific, twisted, life-saving humor, is a gaping, echoing void.
I can almost hear him.
I’ll be mid-sob, convinced I cannot possibly draw another breath in this Patrick-less hellscape, and I can hear him. That ghostly echo in my grief-ravaged brain.
And in those imagined moments, in the echo of his specific brand of assholery, there’s a flicker. A tiny, painful, beautiful flicker of… what?
Not joy, not yet. But recognition. Remembrance. A sharp, poignant reminder of the person he was, the dynamic we had, the way his mind worked, the way he loved me enough to not let me drown in my own bullshit, even if it meant being a sarcastic prick about it.
This isn't me romanticizing being teased or mocked. Fuck that. This is about a specific kind of intimacy, a knowingness, a shared language built on years of understanding each other's bullshit and loving each other anyway. It’s the humor that said, "I see you, in all your ridiculous, flawed glory, and you’re still my goddamn person."
And missing that humor now, in the face of this level of abyss? It’s like missing oxygen. It’s like missing a limb. It’s a fundamental part of my coping mechanism, my shared reality, that has been violently amputated.
Because let’s be honest, the generic "there, there, it will be okay" that the world offers? It doesn't fucking cut it. It’s like trying to put a Hello Kitty band-aid on a goddamn sucking chest wound. It’s insulting. It’s dismissive. It’s utterly fucking useless.
What you crave, what your soul screams for, is their specific brand of comfort. Their understanding. Their unique way of seeing the world, and seeing you. And if that way involved a healthy dose of sarcasm, inappropriate jokes, and a refusal to treat you like a delicate flower about to shatter, then the humorless sympathy of others feels like a foreign language, a pale imitation, a constant, agonizing reminder of what you’ve lost.
You find yourself in situations that, if they were here, would have been fodder for days of shared, dark amusement. The funeral director with the unfortunate toupee. The relative who brought a Jell-O salad to the wake that looked like a prop from a goddamn horror movie. The sheer, breathtaking stupidity of some of the condolence cards. These are the moments where their absence screams the loudest, because you can almost hear the witty, scathing, probably wildly inappropriate commentary they would have provided. And the silence where that commentary should be is a fresh stab wound.
You try to replicate it sometimes. You try to find the dark humor yourself. You make a sarcastic remark, trying to channel their spirit. And sometimes, it works. For a fleeting second, you feel that familiar spark. But then the reality crashes back in – they’re not here to share the joke. They’re not here to volley it back with an even sharper retort. And the laughter dies in your throat, replaced by that familiar, aching hollowness.
This isn’t about wanting to make light of your grief. This is about recognizing that a significant part of what made your relationship unique, what made your connection so powerful, was that shared, often twisted, sense of humor. It was a language you spoke. A way you navigated the world together. And losing that is like losing a fundamental part of your vocabulary, your ability to process and cope with the inherent absurdity of existence.
I find myself side-eying the perpetually earnest. The people who take everything so goddamn seriously. The ones who respond to my raw, bleeding pain with solemn nods and hushed, reverent tones. I want to scream, "For fuck's sake, someone make a goddamn joke! A bad one! An inappropriate one! Anything to break this suffocating, sanctimonious piety!" Because he would have. He would have found the crack in the solemnity, the hilariousness in the agony, and he would have used it, not to diminish the pain, but to make it, just for a moment, a little more bearable.
This is the profound, often isolating, loneliness of missing a very specific kind of companion. The companion who didn't just love you despite your darkness, your cynicism, your sarcasm; they often met you there, embraced it, amplified it, armed with a contraband flashlight, a bottle of questionable whiskey, and a dirty limerick or two. The companion who understood that sometimes, when you're staring into the abyss, the only sane, rational, empowering response is to flip it the goddamn bird and tell it a knock-knock joke so terrible it makes the void itself cringe.
And now, when you’re navigating the biggest abyss of your fucking life, that specific brand of light, that specific brand of laughter, is gone. And its absence is a profound, relentless ache.
It makes you question your own coping mechanisms. Am I being disrespectful if I find a moment of dark humor in this hellscape? Am I a monster if, amidst the tears, a cynical, sarcastic thought about the sheer ridiculousness of it all makes me almost smile? Would they think I’m losing it, or would they be right there beside me, whispering an even more outrageous punchline?
Asshole.
And I'd probably punch him in the arm, a real punch, not a love tap. And then maybe, just maybe, a tiny, fragile laugh would escape. A laugh tinged with tears, yes. A laugh that felt like broken glass in my throat. But a laugh nonetheless. A shared moment of defiance. A reminder that even in the darkest fucking pits of hell, weirdness persists. And sometimes, weirdness is the only goddamn handhold I've got.
Missing that isn’t just missing laughter. It’s missing a fundamental way of processing reality. It’s missing a co-conspirator in the face of life’s relentless bullshit. It’s missing the one person who could look at your complete and utter devastation and, without diminishing it, still find a way to remind you that the world is a strange, fucked-up, often hilarious place, even when your heart is shattered into a million goddamn pieces.
So, if you find yourself in the middle of a breakdown, tears streaming, snot flying, soul screaming, and a tiny, insidious voice in the back of your head whispers what they would have said – something sarcastic, something inappropriate, something that would make polite society gasp – don’t shut it down. Don’t feel guilty.
Lean into it.
Because that imagined laughter, that ghostly echo of their twisted humor, that’s not a betrayal of your grief. That’s a testament to the depth and uniqueness of your love. That’s them, still with you, in the way they knew best. Still trying to lance the boil. Still trying to remind you that even in this unbearable agony, there are cracks where the crazy can seep in.
They'd be laughing at your breakdown, that magnificent asshole. And then they'd pull you close, wipe your goddamn tears, and help you find a reason to flip the bird to the universe and keep fucking going.
And goddamn, that’s a love worth missing like oxygen. That’s a laughter worth aching for. That’s a legacy of irreverent survival worth carrying forward, one dark, twisted, life-affirming, probably wildly inappropriate joke at a time. Because if they taught you anything, it was that even in hell, there’s usually something fucking funny if you look hard enough.
Asshole.
HOLY SH*T THEY'RE GONE, no bullshit grief, survival guide, uncensored grief, unfiltered grief
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