Written by Dennis Harvell
How Many Times Can You Miss A Person?
I saw it floating in the casual digital noise of a Sunday afternoon. How many times can you miss a person until it doesn’t hurt anymore?
I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. How do you condense a quarter‑century of ghosts into a text box? How do you explain to strangers that I have lost three of the primary anchors of my life — my mother who left us far too young, my best‑friend brother Rodney almost eighteen years ago, and my baby brother Timothy more than thirty years back?
If I answered honestly, I’d have to tell them the truth: the count never stops. The math of grief doesn’t work that way.
People want grief to behave, to follow rules, to stay on schedule. We live in a culture obsessed with closure. Folks expect grief to be a linear highway with an exit ramp called “getting over it.” But when loss hits close to home, it touches the bedrock of who you are. My brothers and my mother are woven into the foundation of my childhood. You don’t get over your foundation. You build around it.
After decades of carrying these absences, I’ve learned that missing someone isn’t a single, flat emotion. It evolves. In the beginning, it is an eviction notice — you are suddenly locked out of the life you knew. But over thousands of repetitions, the missing undergoes a psychological shift. It transforms from a sharp, paralyzing scream into what I call “The Kitchen’s Silence” — a quiet, heavy space where the memories are so thick you can almost hear the old laughter echoing off the walls, the kind of silence that knows your name.
I write about them constantly on my blog.
People often ask why I bare my soul on the page. The truth is, writing provides a sanctuary that face‑to‑face interaction simply cannot match. When you sit across from someone in the physical world, there is an unspoken pressure. People want you to be okay so they can feel okay. You filter your words, manage their discomfort, and pretend to be “fine” to keep the conversation polite.
But the page demands no filters. On the page, I can let the tears fall without apology. I can translate the raw data of my soul.
It is through this unfiltered writing, and through my dreams, that I meet them now. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I am spiritual enough to recognize when my subconscious calls forward my anchors when I need them most. And what’s fascinating is how specifically they choose to appear.
My mother comes to me not to guide or direct, but purely to guard. She always appears as a younger, vibrant version of herself — from the days before she became sick. It is an intentional act of mercy by my subconscious, allowing me to sit in the comfort of her healthiest, happiest state, just to let me know that everything is okay.
My brothers, however, arrive as an active rescue team. They appear exactly when I need help, intervening without me ever having to utter a single syllable. They just know. In The Silent Passenger, as I sit graying and haggard at the wheel, a young Timothy silently reaches from the backseat to stop the car when the brakes fail. In Maintenance From Above, Rodney returns to handle the deep structural maintenance of my heavy heart.
The mind remembers people not as they were when they left, but as they were when they held you up.
That is the bittersweet geometry of long‑term loss. Time stands still for the ones we lost, while it marches brutally forward for us.
So how many times can you miss a person until it stops hurting? Never. The ache never fully expires. But if you interrogate the pain instead of running from it, you find a strange logic in the bizarre. The hurt softens into a fierce, protective gratitude. They are not here in the physical present, but they remain by my side. Every time I miss them, it is simply my soul confirming the truth: they mattered, they shaped me, and their light is still the one I walk by.
