Protecting the Boy

On grief, attachment, and learning to carry myself

Photo: Ron Lynch, Storytelling for Adults in Austin, TX | May 2, 2026

In the last eight years, I have lost my brother, my father, my uncle, a child, a marriage, a film, my health, and finally a relationship that had become intertwined with all of it.

And yet somehow, I am still here.

In April of 2018, my younger brother Ben took his own life after years of battling depression. There are griefs that never fully leave the body. They simply become part of the architecture you carry inside yourself. His death was one of them.

The following year, I watched a film project I had devoted four years of my life to collapse in a haze of betrayal and heartbreak. I had poured myself into it completely—creatively, emotionally, financially—believing not only in the work, but in the people beside me.

That same year, while on our honeymoon in Hawaii, my wife and I learned at twenty weeks that we were going to lose our baby. When we returned home, she underwent an emergency procedure. I still remember the strange disorientation of moving through airports and hotel lobbies carrying a grief too large for language.

Then came 2020.

Like everyone else, we lived through the fear and psychic fragmentation of COVID, but during that first terrible wave I also lost my father. Somewhere in the middle of all that darkness, however, another child entered our lives—a reminder that blessing and suffering often arrive through the same doorway.

In 2022, I lost my uncle, the man who had been more of a father to me than my own father. He was the greatest artistic influence on my life and one of the deepest loves I have ever known. Losing him felt like losing a compass.

In 2021, my marriage began to dissolve.

Then, in 2023, my wife asked for a divorce, and we’ve been navigating the pain and complexity of that ever since.

Then, in the summer of 2025, I was diagnosed with cancer.

Nine months of surgeries, fear, uncertainty, a broken health care system filled with ineptitude, physical pain, and psychological exhaustion followed. So far, I am clear.

And finally, about a month ago, a relationship that had existed through much of this season of loss came to an end as well.

For a while, I thought the story was simply about heartbreak and endurance. About surviving one wave after another.

But lately I’ve begun to understand something deeper.

Much of my life was unconsciously organized around what therapists and Jungians often call “the mother wound”—the deep longing to be soothed, carried, reassured, and emotionally protected through love, intimacy, achievement, sex, art, or devotion from others.

For years, I was searching for someone else to regulate the grief for me. Someone to quiet the nervous system. Someone to protect the frightened boy beneath the artist, the filmmaker, the husband, the father, the man.

But no lover can permanently do that work for us.

Eventually, life forces the meeting.

The meeting between the man and the boy.

That realization has changed everything for me.

Over the last month, I have been doing deeper inner and outer work than perhaps at any other point in my life—therapy, men’s work, nervous system regulation, journaling, meditation, long walks, difficult conversations, physical discipline, cold exposure, abstinence, silence, and the deliberate removal of distraction. No social media. No news cycle. More fiction. More reflection. More stillness.

Not as performance. Not as branding. Survival demanded it.

And slowly, something has begun to shift.

For the first time, I do not feel like I am trying to exile the boy inside me, shame him, or “man up” over him. I feel something else emerging instead:

Compassion.

Protection.

Responsibility.

The understanding that healing may not come from killing the boy, but from finally becoming the man capable of taking care of him.

I am still in the cocoon.

Still tired. Still grieving. Still unfinished.

But for the first time in many years, I can feel the possibility of becoming whole instead of merely surviving.

And that, more than anything else, feels like the beginning of a new life.