Captain Frank Leto wrote the following article in the final week of Gene Schramm’s life. Schramm passed away the morning the article was published.
I was 35 years old when my father died suddenly. No warning. No drawn-out illness. One day he was there, the next day he wasn’t. I remember how disorienting it felt, how the world kept moving while something fundamental had stopped inside me. At the time, I believed that experience would define my understanding of grief.
I didn’t know then that my career would place me in the presence of death hundreds of times over the decades that followed.
I’ve spent most of my adult life alongside people at the worst moments of their lives. I’ve stood in kitchens where the coffee had gone cold, sat on the edge of hospice beds, and listened to conversations that never make it into textbooks. I’ve watched strong people weaken, families fracture and then rally, and survivors try to understand what comes next when the person they oriented their life around is suddenly gone or slowly slipping away.
In the last few months, grief has come closer again. Three close friends have died. One from cancer linked to exposure at the World Trade Center. Another, Gene Schramm, a New York City firefighter and small business owner, is in hospice now with cancer related to his exposure at the World Trade Center. I visit him almost daily. Sitting with him as his body fails has reminded me, again, that grief does not arrive as a single moment.
It unfolds.
Gene is tough in the way firefighters recognize immediately and trust instinctively. He spent nearly 30 years as a New York City firefighter. Dependable. Solid. The person you want next to you when things go sideways. He built his life around hard work, on the job and afterward. He ran a tree service with his brother Mike, a retired New York City firefighter, climbing, cutting and hauling long after most people would have slowed down. Strength wasn’t something Gene talked about. It was simply how he moved through the world.
He also has the quickest, driest wit I’ve ever known. Never loud. Never wasted. A perfectly timed line delivered without emphasis, often leaving the room quiet for a beat before everyone realized what he’d just said. Even now, as his body weakens, that wit flashes unexpectedly. A look. A few words. Just enough to remind you who he’s always been.
That contrast is what makes watching his decline so brutal. This was a man who once carried heavy tree limbs on his shoulder, who made physical work look effortless. Now, even lifting his head takes effort. An extremely proud man, spending what little strength he has left trying to hold on to his dignity. The loss feels unfair. Indecent, even.
And yet, the room is full of love.
His wife and four daughters surround him. They sit close. They touch his arm, adjust his blanket, and answer questions he no longer needs to ask. There is laughter mixed with tears, stories told again, and quiet moments that don’t need words. Watching a strong body waste away is heartbreaking. Watching a life so clearly well lived, honored in real time by the people who know him best, is something else entirely. One of his daughters, his youngest, Kolline, said recently that his illness has brought their family closer than they’ve ever been, rallying around him in ways they didn’t know were possible.
This is the part of grief we don’t talk about enough. How love and loss can occupy the same space.
The vacuum
People often describe grief as pain, but pain isn’t the whole story. What many people experience is a vacuum, a sudden absence where something constant used to be. Research on grief increasingly supports what people intuitively feel. Grief is not about letting go of the deceased, but about renegotiating the relationship we continue to have with them. The bond doesn’t disappear. It changes form.
I once sat with a woman whose husband had died three years earlier. Their marriage had not been easy. It wasn’t particularly loving, by her own account. And yet, she told me she missed him desperately. When I asked what she missed most, she surprised herself with the answer.
“I miss saying his name,” she said. Not his touch. Not his companionship. His name.
Grief isn’t always about love alone. Sometimes it’s about familiarity. Shared language. Shared history. Saying someone’s name keeps them anchored in the world. When there’s no one left to hear it, the silence can feel disorienting.
I see the same truth playing out now in a different way. I’ve known Gene since I was 13 years old, long before the fire department. There’s a group of about 15 of us who’ve shared close friendships for more than 50 years. Different paths. Different lives. The connection held. Now, that same group circles the back room of his home almost daily — three or four at a time, sitting quietly, telling the same stories, using the same shorthand that’s been there for decades.
What we’re really holding onto in that room isn’t just Gene himself, but the shared language of a life lived together. The names, the jokes, the moments that don’t need explaining. And in a way none of us could have predicted, his illness has pulled those bonds closer, solidifying them in a way that might never have happened otherwise. It’s a strange and uncomfortable truth, but a real one. In the midst of all this loss, there’s also a quiet gratitude for the way he has brought us back together.
There’s a name for what comes after moments like this. Psychologists describe it as a disruption of continuing bonds. The relationship doesn’t end, but it loses its place in daily life. In long friendships, that disruption can be especially profound.
The vacuum left behind isn’t empty. It’s full of echoes.
The moment responsibility arrives
During my years conducting line-of-duty death notifications for the FDNY, there was a moment that repeated itself with remarkable consistency. After the initial shock, after the crying, the disbelief, the stunned quiet, many newly widowed spouses would suddenly look around the room. They’d notice the house, the children, the unanswered questions. And almost inevitably, about an hour in, they would say some version of the same thing:
“How am I going to do this?”
It was never rhetorical. It wasn’t philosophical. It was practical. In that moment, grief collided with responsibility. Even in profound shock, something registered. The obligations had transferred. The life they shared was now theirs alone to carry forward.
What always struck me was how quickly that realization arrived. Not because the love was gone, but because survival demanded orientation. Grief did not wait for readiness. It arrived alongside an awareness of role, duty and decisions that could no longer be deferred or shared.
We always made sure someone was there who could help explain what came next. Not to overwhelm. Not to rush. But to remind them they wouldn’t have to figure everything out in that first hour or that first day. That support would continue. That this moment, as unbearable as it felt, did not require answers yet.
Research helps explain why this moment is so universal. Acute grief activates the stress response, but it also forces rapid cognitive reorganization. The brain scans for threat, responsibility and survival. For widowed parents especially, grief is immediately intertwined with caregiving, protection and continuity.
Love doesn’t pause. Parenting doesn’t pause. Life demands engagement, even as the loss feels unreal. This is one of the cruel truths of grief. Responsibility does not wait for sorrow to soften.
The cost to caregivers
Watching Gene decline has made visible something that often goes unrecognized. The toll on caregivers. His wife and daughters manage medications, anticipate needs, and absorb the emotional weight of watching someone they love disappear in slow motion.
Caregiver burden is not just emotional. It’s physiological. Studies consistently show caregivers experience higher rates of depression, anxiety, sleep disruption, immune suppression and even increased mortality risk. Chronic stress changes the body. The nervous system stays activated. Over time, resilience erodes.
When death finally comes, caregivers don’t just grieve the person they’ve lost. They grieve the loss of the role that consumed their lives. The structure that once organized every hour collapses overnight. Exhaustion catches up. Emotion floods in.
Guilt often follows. Feeling relief. Wanting rest. Imagining a life beyond the bedside. All of it is normal. None of it is simple.
Time, anniversaries and memory
Grief does not follow a straight line. It moves in waves, often triggered by time markers — birthdays, anniversaries, holidays. People who believe they are doing better can still be blindsided by reactions they didn’t anticipate.
Anniversary reactions are well documented. The body remembers dates even when the mind wants to forget them. The nervous system stores loss somatically. A smell, a song, a season can bring grief roaring back without warning. This isn’t regression. It’s recognition.
Recovery without betrayal
I’m careful with the word recovery. Many people hear it as getting over loss. That’s not how grief works. Research on resilience suggests something subtler. People adapt. They integrate the loss into their lives. The pain doesn’t disappear, but it changes shape.
I once met a woman at a New Year’s party who told me, quietly, that this was the year she was going to go on her first date. Her husband had died ten years earlier. She wasn’t announcing closure. She wasn’t celebrating moving on. She was naming readiness. Grief hadn’t left her. Life had grown around it.
What years of witnessing have taught me
Because of my work, I’ve had a view into grief that few people get. I’ve seen it in its earliest shock, its prolonged endurance and its quiet transformation. I’ve learned that there are no universal timelines, no correct emotions and no clean endings.
Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is a relationship that evolves.
Sitting beside Gene, watching his family love him through his final days, I’m reminded that grief begins before death arrives. It unfolds in anticipation, in caregiving, and in the slow letting go of the future we imagined. And when death finally comes, what remains is not emptiness alone.
It’s the echo of a life that mattered. We don’t move on from that. We learn how to carry it.
